Announcing the decision to celebrate 16 January as “National Start-up Day” to take the Startup culture to the country’s far flung areas, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today listed three important aspects of the ‘’massive changes’’ being introduced by his government in this decade to strengthen the start-up ecosystem.

The first was to liberate entrepreneurship and innovation from the web of government processes and bureaucratic silos. The second was to create an institutional mechanism to promote innovation and the third was the handholding of young innovators and young enterprises, he said while interacting with Startups via video conferencing.

Modi pointed out that measures like removing problems of ‘angel tax’, simplification of tax procedure, arranging for government funding, allowing self-certification of 9 labour and 3 environment laws and removal of more than 25000 compliances have already started yielding results.

The Startups gave presentations to the PM on six themes: Growing from Roots; Nudging the DNA; From Local to Global; Technology of Future; Building Champions in Manufacturing; and Sustainable Development.

During their presentation, the startup representatives shared ideas and inputs on a variety of sectors and areas, including robust data collection mechanism in agriculture; making India preferred agri business hub; boosting healthcare through use of technology; tackling issue of mental health; promoting travel and tourism through innovations like virtual tours; ed-tech and job identification; space sector; connecting offline retail market with digital commerce; increasing manufacturing efficiency; defence exports; promoting green sustainable products and sustainable means of transport, among others.

Modi said that organisation of this Start-up India Innovation week was all the more important in this year of “Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav” as the role of the Start-ups would be critical when India’s freedom reaches its centenary year.

The PM said the government’s effort was to institutionalise innovation in the country by creating attraction for innovation among students since childhood. He said that whether it was new drone rules, or new space policy, the priority of the government was to provide opportunities for innovation to as many youth as possible. “Our government has simplified the rules related to IPR registration too,” he added.

He pointed out that India’s campaign for innovation has resulted in improvement of the country’s ranking in global innovation index. India earlier stood at 81 but now it was ranked 46.

Modi informed that startups of India were working with 55 separate industries and the number of startups has increased from less than 500 five years ago to more than 60000 today. The PM said “Our Start-ups are changing the rules of the game. That’s why I believe Start-ups are going to be the backbone of new India.”