StartupIndia scheme is a golden scheme launched by Government of India under MINISTRY OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY to promote and grow the startups in India.

Government of India has introduced very efficient policy to support startups & new business ventures with creative & innovative ideas.

StartupIndia is a campaign to promote banks for financing new ventures to encourage entrepreneurship and star ups with jobs creation. Announced by hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his lecture on 15th August, 2015 from the Red Fort, to encourage entrepreneurs for creating jobs instead of doing jobs and increase employment in India.

The purpose of this Scheme is to restrict role of States in policy domain and to eliminate of “License Raj” and break hurdles like in land permissions, foreign investment, environmental clearances, political interferences etc. It was regulated by DIPP (Department of industrial policy and promotion).

1. Incorporate your Startup/Business

You must first incorporate your business as a Private Limited Company or a Partnership firm or a Limited Liability Partnership. You can refer our earlier post to get the help on Incorporating a company.

2. Register with Startup India

Go to StartupIndia website and follow the simple steps to get registered there as a startup. The entire process is simple and online. All you need to do is log on to the Startup India website and fill up the form with details of your business and upload certain documents. Give entity details, startup office address, authorized representative details, Directors and Partners details etc.

3. Documents in PDF format to be uploaded

A) A letter of recommendation/support

A letter of recommendation, from any of the below, needs to be submitted along with the registration form.(i) A recommendation (regarding innovative nature of business) from an Incubator established in a post-graduate college in India, in a format specified by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP)

(ii) A letter of support by an incubator, which is funded (in relation to the project) by Government of India as part of any specified scheme to promote innovation

(iii) A letter of recommendation (regarding innovative nature of business), from an Incubator, recognized by the Government of India in DIPP specified format

(iv) A letter of funding of not less than 20% in equity, by any Incubation Fund/Angel Fund/Private Equity Fund/Accelerator/Angel Network, duly registered with SEBI that endorses innovative nature of the business

(v) A letter of funding by Government of India or any State Government as part of any specified scheme to promote innovation

(vi) A patent filed and published in the Journal by the Indian Patent Office in areas affiliated with the nature of the business being promoted.

B) Incorporation/Registration Certificate

You need to upload the certificate of incorporation of your company/LLP (Registration Certificate in case of partnership)

C) Description of your business in brief

A brief description of the innovative nature of your products/services.

1. If you want to avail Tax benefits under this scheme: Startups are exempted from income tax for 3 years. But to avail these benefits entity must be certified by the Inter-Ministerial Board (IMB). Start-ups recognized by DIPP, Govt. of India can now directly avail IPR related benefits without requiring any additional certification from IMB. There are certain other conditions as well like the entity must be incorporated on or after the 1st day of April, 2016 but before the 1st day of April, 2019, and must be working towards innovation, development or improvement of products or processes or services, or should be a scalable business model with a high potential of employment generation or wealth creation.
2. Finally self-certify for below steps-
   A) Entity must be a Private Limited Company, Partnership firm or a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) B) Turnover must be less than 25 crores per year. C) Innovation is a must– the business must be working towards innovating something new or significantly improving the existing used technology. D) Your business must not be as a result of splitting up or reconstruction of an existing business.

Apart from the tax benefits startups get after registering in this program, startups also get funding support. Government has set up a fund with an initial corpus of INR 2,500 crore and a total corpus of INR 10,000 crore over a period 4 years (i.e. INR 2,500 crore per year) for the registered startups under StartupsIndia program.

Recently, SEBI has also taken steps to ease Angel Funding for Startups in India. You can follow the above steps to register your startup.

Other than this, there are certain Startup laws every Entrepreneur should follow.