Emerging enterprises hail PM Modi's Startup India action plan

New enterprises today applauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Startup India action plan, saying it will help them gain foothold and encourage more entrepreneurs to start businesses. "This initiative of PM Modi is the right step in making the environment friendlier for entrepreneurs and thus encouraging them to start up. We will wait for the fine print to understand exactly what the next steps will be."However, I can only say that outcome will be in the positive direction and we are very excited," Urbanclap Co-founder Raghav Chandra said. Agreeing with Chandra, Naaptol Online Shopping CEO & Founder Manu Agarwal said this initiative will help startups get a foothold in India. "It will bring the aspiring entrepreneurs and investors on a common platform.We too were a startup not too long ago and with the right cash infusion at the right time, we have grown to be the leading home shopping company in India," he added. "With the Start Up Action plan, we will see more young entrepreneurs take the risk of starting their own venture and building innovative solutions to solve meaningful problems for Indian as well as for the global audience. "I think the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Bill that will allow startups to exit faster, within 90 days is a great step towards encouraging more people to take the plunge of starting a new venture, without the fear of failure," said Shashank ND, Founder & CEO, Practo.On the other hand, mobile e-commerce platform StoreHippo asked for simplification of regulatory compliance issues which affects the industry. "The startup India action plan is a welcome move but more than exemption on Income Tax, the statutory and regulatory compliance related to various filings like Service Tax returns, MCA filings, TDS returns and various state specific compliances are the ones which consume a lot of time and bogs down a startup," StoreHippo.com Founder Rajiv Kumar said. He added: "Most of the startups do not start making profits for initial few years so income tax exemption might not help them as much as would be exemption or deferred timeline for various compliances."Government also needs to be careful about the misuse of the exemption as it might also act as another channel for tax savings." On Saturday, Prime Minister Modi unveiled a slew of incentives to boost start-up businesses, offering them a tax holiday and inspector raj-free regime for three years, capital gains tax exemption and Rs 10,000 crore corpus to fund them. He also announced a self-certification scheme in respect of nine labour and environment laws and said there will be no inspection during the first three years of launch of the venture. Also, a liberalised patent regime is being brought to help start-up businesses register patents, for which the fee will be slashed by 80 percent.