CII to join hands with startups to improve ecosystem in North

Vijay C Roy
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, April 21

To foster entrepreneurship and innovation in North, CII will work with new-age businesses to improve overall startup ecosystem. While the startup ecosystem in the country is replete with growth stories, the northern states seem to be laggard in this regard.

Moreover, access to seed capital and venture funding support is difficult here as compared to the southern and western region.

“India had seven new unicorns in 2020 and in 2019, it had six. It was an historic year for India’s technology industry. In just three months, the country minted at least six new startups with a valuation of $1 billion or more. We will work with these new-age businesses to improve the overall startup ecosystem in the country,” said Abhimanyu Munjal, newly elected chairman of CII Northern Region and joint MD and CEO, Hero FinCorp Ltd., in a virtual interaction with The Tribune.

“We will have a work stream for the purpose. We will have startups in this group to identify the challenges and how to make North an attractive destination for the startups. They will work closely with the state governments to see what can be done to attract more startups. The group will come up with a detailed plan after consulting the state governments and startups for creating an enabling ecosystem in the region,” he said.

On other focus areas, he said the CII would work for MSMEs’ competitiveness and promoting R&D spend. “MSMEs are the core of CII. We will take up issues related to cost and availability of finance, payment delays, labour laws, procedural bottlenecks and compliances. Ramping up investment in R&D by the private sector will be the key for India to become the third largest economy,” he said.

Other focus areas of CII Northern Region include employment generation, environmental sustainability, governance and digitisation and rural-urban connect to ensure movement of workers from less productive primary to secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy.