'Startup' Failure Gradually Reducing In India; More Awareness Needed: STPI DG

Asserting that the rate of failure of startups in the country is slowly declining, Director General of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) Arvind Kumar said there is a need to create more awareness about what the government is doing to promote startups. Talking to PTI, Kumar said awareness campaign is very much required amongst the youth about startups. "I go to a number of engineering colleges, they don't know anything about startups, they don't know about STPI, they don't know anything about what the country and government is doing," he commented.

The STPI DG was in Goa to address the Future Tech Leadership Forum Goa 2023 on Saturday organised by the stakeholders in the state's IT industry. Kumar said there should be a subject on entrepreneurship for students in 12th standard where the product cycle should be explained and they should be made job producers and not job seekers. He said STPIs' directors are going to various colleges and giving lectures to youngsters about startups and also how to get funds for that.

"I think awareness is happening but it has to be accelerated," Kumar added. He said though they have not done any study on the failure of startups, there are studies which claim that the rate in India is one against ten. "Failure is a part of startup ecosystem not just in India but also in the developed part of the world.

Our country has just started the journey of startups, so naturally we will fail more, compared to those countries which have started ten years back," he said. Talking about Centres of Entrepreneurship (COE) created by STPI, Kumar said such initiatives are working to reduce the failure rate. "COEs have chief mentors who are authority on the particular subject. They guide startups in COEs and do hand-holding. When something (startup idea) is ready, we call Venture Capitalists, Fund Managers who see the product and see if they can invest in it," he said. "Failure of startups is also reducing with the passage of time."