Gujarat, K’taka, Kerala and TN lead states in startup ranking

Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have emerged as top rankers in the fourth edition of states’ ranking on startup policies which saw the highest-ever participation with 33 states and Union territories participating.

A ‘National Report’ encompassing the full exercise, along with a ‘compendium of best practices’ and individual ‘state report’ for all participating states was al-so launched. In this fourth edition of the states’ ranking, 3.102 startups re-ceived funding worth Rs 392 crore.
Minister of Commerce & Industry Piyush Goyal who addressed the ‘Startup Awards & State Ranking Awards’ on Tuesday, announced plans to organise a ‘Startup Maha Kumbh’ in March 2024 and commended the significant pro-gress made in the sector over the last eight years.

“Startups are playing a pivotal role in India’s journey towards becoming a de-veloped nation by 2047 across diverse sectors ranging from medtech, fintech, agrotech to the aviation sector, drones and simulators,” said Goyal, encourag-ing startups to focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and explore innovative ideas around sustainable tourism like the ‘Wed-in-India’ initiative as suggested by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Going forward, the Government will take key initiatives to further support startups, including the categorisation of startups into different sectors for more focused interactions, the sanitization of data to identify their locations and track development stage of the startups, and efforts to ensure all startups are registered on the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) portal.

He assured continued government support for the startup ecosystem, inviting entrepreneurs to leverage the vast consumer market and work collaboratively to transition from an emerging to a developed startup system. For the purpose of evaluation, the states and UTs were divided into two cate-gories with category A including states and UTs with a population of more than 1 crore, and category B including states and UTs with a population of less than 1 crore. Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerela, Tamil Nadu were the best performers in category A, while Himachal Pradesh emerged as the best performer in catego-ry B. The governments of Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Telangana, Punjab emerged as top performers in Category A, while Arunachal Pradesh and Me-ghalaya championed as top performers in Category B.

The participants were evaluated across 7 broad reform areas consisting of 25 action points ranging from institutional support, fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, access to market, incubation and mentorship support, funding support, capacity building of enablers and roadmap to a sustainable future.