Economic Survey: Delhi dethrones Bengaluru as India's start-up capital

India has 83 unicorns with a total valuation of $277.77 billion, the Survey of 2021-22 says

Delhi has replaced Bengaluru as the startup capital of India, according to the Economic Survey 2021-22 tabled by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Parliament on Monday. The survey says that over 5,000 recognised start-ups were added in Delhi while 4,514 start-ups were added in Bengaluru between April 2019 to December 2021.

With a total of 11,308 start-ups, Maharashtra has the highest number of recognised startups. ndia had a record number of start-ups (44) reach unicorn status in 2021. It overtook the UK to emerge as the third highest country in number of unicorns after the US and China which added 487 and 301 unicorns respectively in 2021. As of January 14, 2022, India has 83 unicorns with a total valuation of $ 277.77 billion.

Moreover, the number of new recognised start-ups have increased to over 14,000 in 2021-22 from only 733 in 2016-17. As a result, India has become the third largest startup ecosystem in the world after the US and China.

The Economic Survey says that in the last three years the number of start-ups in the space sector has increased from 11 in 2019 to 47 in 2021. One of the important factors responsible for this  was providing a predictable, forward-looking, well defined and enabling regulatory regime for space activities in the country. The first to be updated were the SpaceCom and SpaceRS policies, further liberalising the traditional satellite communication and remote sensing sectors, respectively, and enabling entrepreneurs to take up end-to-end activities in these domains.

The Economic Survey also highlighted that the government’s most of India’s startups are in the IT/ knowledge-based sector. Intellectual property, specifically patents are key to this knowledge-based economy. There has been a gradual increase in the filing and granting of patents in India. The number of patents filed in India has gone up from 39,400 in 2010-11 to 45,444 in 2016-17 to 58,502 in 2020-21 and the patents granted in India has gone up from 7,509 to 9,847 to 28,391 during the same time period.