The current emphasis on startups by Indian society can be attributed to a couple of things: Firstly, the stories of successful startups are aspirational in terms of creating impact, wealth, or solving real problems that society faces at scale. Secondly, with the imminent rise of automated manufacturing and artificial intelligence (AI) and the need for reskilling our workforce for the rapidly changing future, startups can play a very important role in social mobility and making access to capital equitable.Successful startup ecosystems can enable anyone with a sound business model and capacity to work hard to quickly accrue experience and wealth, and become job creators that others in turn can look up to. The Indian government has been making a synergistic effort across ministries and sectors to nurture innovation and startups.In January 2016, the Startup India movement was launched by the Prime Minister. The government has been working to ease regulations, reduce the compliance burden for startups, provide hands on support, as well as promote a culture of innovation so that more and more youngsters become entrepreneurs. A regime based on self-certification has been ushered in and states have actively participated.Twenty-three states and Union territories have confirmed that startups can self-certify compliance for three years in respect of six labour laws in a fine example of Centrestate collaboration. Several startups have already been been facilitated in terms of financing, business structuring, marketing, etc. A panel of over 423 facilitators has been appointed to help startups file patents.The government has supported startups on the funding front as well, which is increasingly becoming a concern as VCs are moving away from models with high ‘burn’ rates. We have engaged with 80+ venture capital networks and have deal flow arrangements with most of them.Total commitments of Rs 632 crore have been made under the Fund of Funds for Startups. As startups transition to more profit-oriented models, the government’s move to exempt income tax for a period of three years will also help them expand their business offerings and scale up. The government has also relaxed public procurement guidelines so that conditions of experience and turnover are not required for startups. The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) at the Niti Aayog has been working to instill a culture of innovation in our children from a young age. To do this, we are building Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) at schools all over India to move away from learning by rote to learning by building and experimenting.These labs have equipment like 3D printers, robotics and electronics development tools, IoT (internet of things) and sensors etc. and have programmes that are aimed at fostering curiosity, creativity and imagination in young minds.The AIM team has established 941 tinkering labs across India, and aims to establish 2,000 such ATLs by the end of 2017. Apart from this, AIM has selected 13 institutions to establish incubation centres.Initially, the startup movement in India placed a lot of emphasis on tried-and-tested ideas and executing them well. These startups created a lot of value and have been able to provide jobs to thousands of people thus far. Today, we are seeing the startup culture spreading across sectors. Startups like Byju’s in the education sector, MitraBiotech in the biotech sector, SocialCops in the social data sector, and Ather Energy in the mobility sector are fine examples of such innovative startups.India has several challenges. We need, among other things, 30-day flyovers, a zero-blackout economy, universal drinking water, connected farms which can sell to the global market and lowcost green batteries to power electrical vehicles and stabilise the grid. Our startups must take on these challenges and find solutions to India’s problems. When they find a viable business model the market will not merely be the one billion plus Indian market but also the next seven billion people of the world, many of whom will move from poverty to the middle class in the coming years.In the area of AI, startups have traditionally focused on sectors such as defence, national security, and the like. However, agriculture, health, education and even the judiciary are sectors where there is a major confluence of need and utility of AI.According to McKinsey, AI can produce some of the largest differences in profits in education and health compared to all other sectors. AI has the unique advantage of being able to solve problems of access and quality simultaneously. Satellite data can be used to better insure crops, conversational agents capable of understanding India’s languages can be used to increase the access to learning material, and diagnostics of medical images can in some cases be done with better accuracy than the human eye. Today, citizens are suffering everyday because of our enormous judicial backlog. We need an Indian startup that can give legal inputs on contracts and convert legal language into a variety of Indian languages in a way that lay people can interpret.The advent of Industry 4.0 will also have a major impact on innovation in technology. In the future, the confluence of automation, rapid prototyping, and affordable 3D printing will allow manufacturing startups to start easily with a far lower capital requirement than before.Biotechnology has progressed to the point that it is becoming feasible to 3D print tissue. 3D printing organs is not far off on the horizon.The energy sector, with smart grid management being put in place and with electric vehicles on the horizon, is a sector ripe for innovative disruption. In fact, startups are innovating in areas that are major national programmes. A logistics startup called Shadowfax has manufactured domestically a low-cost electric vehicle for intra-city deliveries. Ola has done the first large-scale pilot for passenger electric vehicles in Nagpur. The financial sector, which has over 900 startups, will see constant disruption and innovation.Startups are vehicles for directed, scalable, and sustainable innovation. The government is growing more and more cognizant of the fact that it should be facilitative and act as a catalyst to provide greater momentum to this movement. We need to build an innovatively agile society which can grapple with problems and create workable and cost-effective solutions quickly. With our young population, we should become the patent factory for the entire world by creating usable innovations.For India, startups can play a twin role by being the harbingers of innovation in sectors and increasing economic output but also by making our society more equitable by solving problems of huge social import.