Congress Manifesto 2019: Consultation on start-ups held in Bengaluru

Bengaluru, Nov 19: The Indian National Congress held a Manifesto Consultation on Start-ups in Bengaluru. It was chaired by Professor Rajeev Gowda, MP, Shri Priyank Kharge, Minister for Social Justice, Smt. Soumya Reddy, MLA participated along with a range of experts from the startup ecosystem.

Mr. Ravi Gururaj emphasised the need to promote start-ups across in three stages, Starting, Take-off and Expansion stage and suggested minimum regulation for start-ups to succeed.

Need for government to create digital public goods to enable the start-up ecosystem was emphasized by Sharad Sharma of iSpirt.

Naganand Doraiswamy wanted a focus on tech-innovation. Anushka Shetty wanted start-up culture and facilities to be promoted in non-metro cities and to enable women working out of home to participate.

Participants emphasized the need for access to finance and domestic capital that would help start-ups avoid selling out to foreign venture capital.

Prof. Rajeev Gowda, Convenor of the Manifesto Committee, stated that healthcare, transport, and other regulatory frameworks will be modernised to enable start-ups to transform these sectors.

Shri Priyank Kharge pointed out that initiatives of the Government of Karnataka like Elevate 100, Unnathi etc, could be adopted at a national scale. Smt Sowmya Reddy spoke about how government must facilitate infrastructure to enable startups to set up and grow.

People can send their inputs:

The Manifesto Committee, under the Chairmanship of former Union Minister P Chidambaram, has been holding consultation events for the last one month. Prof. Rajeev Gowda is the Convenor of the committee.

The committee already completed many consultation events like Ex-Servicemen, MSME's, Education, Environment, SC/ST and OBC, Healthcare, Food Security and Nutrition, and Banking in cities like Aligarh, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Mangalore, Guwahati, Pune, Nagpur, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Vishakapatnam, and other cities across the country.

Also, urges the public to send their inputs to [email protected] or through its Website: manifesto.inc.in. In this consultation, the party received valuable suggestions from representatives of various organisations for the "People's Manifesto".