'Deep partnership between innovations in US, startups in India'

Washington, Jan 20: There is a deep partnership between innovations in the US and startups in India, Indian Ambassador to the US Arun K Singh has said, days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious Startup India programme in New Delhi.

"There is a deep partnership between innovation spaces like Silicon Valley and startups in India, so we are trying to see how to promote that. In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of energy in the startup domain in India," Singh told Geekwire.com in an interview yesterday.

The top Indian diplomat is currently visiting Seattle to meet officials of the top American companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks.

"It is important that I go out and meet with these companies to understand what they are doing and just get a sense for the possibilities."

"We want to figure out how to use technology to enable empowerment in India — to enable the poorest sections of society to be able to access opportunity, and to enable us to address our challenges while minimising use of resources," he was quoted as saying by GeekWire.

India, he said, is trying to see how "we can use e- commerce to enable us to contribute" to the economic and social processes in India.

Responding to a question on H-1B visas which are popular among Indian IT companies, Singh said it is up to the US to decide but referred to the immense contributions being made by Indian techies who come to the US on this work visas.

"They are making an important contribution. I get the sense that US companies find the Indian H1-B workers extremely useful for them to be able to meet their objectives," he said.

On Saturday, Modi launched the Startup India programme to boost digital entrepreneurship and announced Income tax exemption to startups for three years.

The government will set up a fund with an initial corpus of Rs 2,500 crore and a total corpus of Rs 10,000 crore over four years.

PTI