Karnataka will soon have a policy for entrepreneurial growth with innovation to build an ecosystem attractive to angel investments, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said Wednesday.
Angel investors are wealthy individuals who provide capital for start-up firms.
"We are working on a set of policy measures to promote entrepreneurial growth and attract early stage investments in the state," Siddaramaiah told India Inc at a two-day annual summit on innovation and start-ups here.
Asserting that Karnataka was resourceful in meeting the national agenda for setting up an entrepreneurial eco-system, he said that many such policies proved beneficial as they took the partners-in-progress approach to all stakeholders, including industry, academia and the state.
"As India is an entrepreneurial country, I believe entrepreneurship can be accelerated in a regulatory environment by ensuring capital, talent and mentoring," Siddaramiah said in his address at the ninth innovation summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.
Noting that promotion of early stage investments to woo angel investors or venture funds with incentives was imperative, Siddarmaiah recalled that the state had created an ecosystem in the mid-90s for the rapid growth of the software sector with the help of the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) and its dedicated satellite gateway in the Electronics City.
"As entrepreneurship tends to be innovation-driven, its ecosystem will help find solutions to provide quality education, affordable healthcare, clean energy, post-harvest agricultural processing, infrastructure development and financial inclusion," the chief minister pointed out.
As manufacturing and services sectors have the potential to create opportunities for entrepreneurship, he said the paradigm shift would take the Indian economy to the next growth stage, to harness the youth-heavy demography.
"India needs to create 10-15 million jobs a year over the next decade to provide gainful employment to its young population. Accelerating entrepreneurship and attracting investments will be key to such large-scale employment generation."
He said strong manufacturing and engineering capabilities, a large talent pool, huge domestic demand and geographical location offered Karnataka strategic advantages for servicing the global market.
The growing IT-telecom infrastructure presents huge opportunity for technology-focused businesses. Similarly, healthcare industry is projected to grow seven times while expenditure on higher education is poised to expand five times by 2020.
"Urban infrastructure has potential to attract $600 billion investment over the next two decades and power generation needs to be trebled despite the challenges of sourcing it from conventional fossil fuels - coal and gas," the chief minister said.
With the world going through hard times due to socio-economic crisis, which is making governments and policy makers re-think development, he advocated a balanced growth through productivity, infrastructure, quality of life, equity and environmental sustainability.
"Such a balanced approach will help in creating equilibrium between industrial development and social-ecological development."
CII president and Infosys vice-chairman S. Gopalakrishnan, British deputy high commissioner Ian Felton, CII Karnataka council chairman Soumitra Bhattacharya and chief executives of India Inc are part of the summit.
