The total number of startups in India grew sevenfold from around 7,000 in 2008 to around 50,000 by end-2018.

Startup India programme launched by Prime minister Narendra Modi in January 2016 to support startups under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) is recognising 26 startups on a daily basis. “With 26 startups being recognised by @DIPPGOI every day, #NewIndia is rapidly growing as a startup hub!,” government investment promotion agency Invest India tweeted on Sunday. The total count of such startups so far stood at 24,927, according to the programme. The figure has nearly tripled from 8,939 startups till March 2018, according to the data sourced earlier from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Maharashtra with 12,064 followed by 10,272 startups in Delhi and Karnataka with 7,635 startups are the top 3 ecosystems with DPIIT-recognised startups in India, according to the Startup India portal. The total number of startups in India grew sevenfold from around 7,000 in 2008 to around 50,000 by end-2018, KPMG India said in a report in February this year. DPIIT had in April this year announced its Startup India Vision 2024 to boost the ecosystem with a slew of measures including reducing the monthly time taken towards compliance including tax returns, GST filing etc to ‘just one hour per month’, PTI reported citing an official. However, this might be tricky for the government to achieve since the time taken for GST filing alone is subjective based on the company size and presence.

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“We have 14 offices in multiple states and it takes around 7-10 days to crunch data and calculate, prepare documents, and then file GST. One hour might be the time involved in filing GST but the entire process to be completed in a single hour is not possible today,” Mandeep Manocha, Co-founder and CEO, Cashify had told Financial Express Online. DPIIT in its Vision document had targeted 50,000 new startups, 20 lakh direct and indirect jobs by 2024, 500 new incubators and accelerators, 100 innovation zones in urban local bodies and seven research parks operational to support innovative startups. The department had also proposed allocating entire corpus of Rs 10,000 crore Fund of Funds along with enhancing CSR funding to incubators. DPIIT had also said about establishing an India Startup Fund of Rs 1,000 crore for technology startups and another Rs 1,000 crore in seed funding to startups.