Admitting that India’s regime for start-ups is “complex and difficult”, a top official today said the government is working “in a big way” to improve the country’s taxation, patent and registration ecosystem.
“… Regime for start-ups is complex and difficult. Out of the many start-ups that succeed in India, 60-65 per cent relocate to Singapore. So, challenge is to create a world-class regime to bring these start-ups back,” DIPP Secretary Amitabh Kant said at a CII event here.
“We have to work on improving taxes, patent and registration ecosystem. We are working on this in a big way.”
Highlighting the need to make India “an extremely easy place” to do business for start-ups, Kant said the government is trying to scrap multiple regulatory clearances.
“If you look at any part of the world, we see angel investors are coming and supporting start-ups. We need to give them a bigger push. We are trying to do away with a lot of regulatory clearances. But we also need a fund of funds to handhold angel investors,” Kant added.
He projected that India’s e-commerce market, which currently stands at USD 10 billion (Rs 66,000 crore), may grow to USD 100 billion by 2017 and even USD 250 billion in a decade.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Secretary said the government is creating a separate set-up for patents and attempting to bring down the registration time and trademarks to 18 months and 3 months, respectively.
“We are creating a separate regime for patents and recruiting 1,000 people as patent examiners… We are trying to complete the registration of patents in 18 months. We are doing the same with trademarks where we want to bring down the time of registration to 3 months,” Kant said.
Moreover, he said, under the new patent rules, a separate window for Make in India and start-up applications are in the offing.