India offers a big incentive for Indian startups as well as industries to invest in the future

• Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has announced that corporates can now spend 2% of their CSR on government initiatives like PSU incubators as well as public funded education entities including IITs.
• She had earlier said that 80 livelihood business incubators and 20 technology business incubators will be set up in 2019-2020.
• The state run incubators in India include the likes Techno Hub, Rajasthan, T-Hub Hyderabad from the Telangana government, Kerala Startup Mission among others.

The Indian government has announced that corporates can now spend 2% of their CSR spending on government initiatives like PSU incubators as well as public funded education entities including IITs.

The state run incubators in India include the likes Techno Hub, Rajasthan, T-Hub Hyderabad from the Telangana government, Kerala Startup Mission among others.

The Indian government has had a positive attitude to increase incubation centres in the country. During the budget announcement in July, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that 80 livelihood business incubators and 20 technology business incubators will be set up in 2019-2020 to encourage and develop 75,000 social entrepreneurs in India.

This will come as a big boon to the Indian startup ecosystem which has been talking about the need of more government initiatives to push forward incubation which will result in the spur of startups.

Including the CSR spend towards incubation, will also encourage the corporates who have already been actively involved with startups through partnered accelerator programs, incubation as well as acquisition of startups.

Apoorv Sharma, co-founder & president, Venture Catalysts, in an earlier interview with Business Insider had put forth the same point to say it will be a vital factor in increasing India’s ranking in the global startup ecosystem.

However, Sharma believes that in India, private incubators too need to be given incentives. He cites the example of the US and China, where successful incubators and accelerators are the private ones.

Sitharaman announced a slew of initiatives that has the markets rejoicing – corporate tax has been slashed. A domestic company can pay income tax at 22% if they don’t seek any exemption or incentives and there will be an Effective Tax Rate of 25.17% inclusive of all surcharges and cess for such domestic companies.