Lukewarm response to Startup India scheme in Amritsar

Tribune News Service

Neeraj Bagga

Amritsar, January 16

Even as the Union Government has announced to celebrate January 16 as National Startup Day, the holy city has recorded only 21 entries under the flagship scheme so far.

Launched in 2016, the Startup India scheme neither found much votaries in the state nor this border district.

Naresh Johar, who obtained this information from the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, said only 408 startups were set up in the entire state till 2021, which is less than 1 per cent of the national average, where 46,042 startups established their units.

Ahead of the elections, he said, all political parties, including the ruling Congress, compete to outdo each other by offering freebies to people, but no effort was spared for promoting startups. Leaders of these parties are parrying the practical thought as to how a state deep under debt would foot the burden of freebies, he said.

The incumbent government is not leaving any stone unturned in extending freebies but it did not put in any effort to capitalise on the national scheme.

Under the scheme, it could have revived its industries, which are in doldrums, by offering them a helping hand.

According to Raman Gupta, an industrialist, unlike Punjab, Delhi is free from debt, it does not offer subsidy like Punjab is extending to farmers on power.

Next year, the financial condition of the state is likely to aggravate further with the discontinuation of the GST compensation. A rough estimate suggests that the GST revenue will fall by nearly 40 per cent.

He suggested that the government could have introduced freebies from its own side to implement the scheme. In the contemporary set-up, it is only the industry that could provide jobs, sustain finances, meaningful platform to skilled artisans and keep youth away from drugs and other negative activities.

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