With an aim to bring together the country’s startups, entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, is organising the Startup India Innovation Week 2024 from 10th January 2024 to 18th January 2024 to celebrate the Indian Startup Ecosystem and the National Startup Day (16th January 2024).

During the Innovation Week 2024, Secretary, DPIIT, Shri Rajesh Kumar Singh will deliver the inaugural address in the Startup Seminar: ‘Startups Unlocking Infinite Potential’ on 11th January 2024, at the Tenth Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit in Gandhinagar, Gujarat which aims to provide a global forum for business networking, knowledge sharing, and inclusive socio-economic development.

On 16th January 2024, as part of the National Startup Day celebrations, DPIIT is organising the result declaration and felicitation ceremony for the National Startup Awards 2023 and the 4th edition of the States’ Startup Ranking Framework, two of the flagship initiatives under Startup India. Physical events are also being organised across the country by incubators to celebrate the innovations being developed across districts by Indian entrepreneurs. These events include dedicated workshops for startups, mentorship sessions, stakeholder round tables, panel discussions, among others.

Eight virtual Ask Me Anything (AMA) live sessions are planned to be conducted from 10th to 17th January 2024 with startup ecosystem enablers including incubators and accelerators, investors, mentors, unicorns, corporates, startups, academia, and government to build capacity of the ecosystem.

Further, 5 dedicated mentorship sessions focused on ‘How to Start Up’ are planned to be conducted focused on capacity building of aspiring entrepreneurs and student entrepreneurs on topics such as understanding business structures, processes to incorporate an entity, and building a business plan.

The Startup India initiative was launched by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi on 16th January 2016 to build a strong ecosystem for nurturing innovation, boosting startups, and encouraging investments in the startup ecosystem of the country. Emphasising and promoting recognition of startups contributing towards nation building, socio economic development, and self-reliance, the Prime Minister in 2022, declared 16th January the National Startup Day. 16th January 2024 marks the completion of 8 marvellous years of the launch of Startup India. From about 400 startups in 2016 to more than 1,17,000 recognised startups today, the Indian startup ecosystem has grown from strength to strength over the years. The Startup India initiative is also playing an important role in realising the vision of Viksit Bharat @2047, the Prime Minister’s clarion call to make India a developed nation by 2047, the 100th year of independence.

The National Startup Awards is an initiative to recognize and reward outstanding startups and ecosystem enablers that are building innovative products or solutions and scalable enterprises, with high potential of employment generation or wealth creation, demonstrating measurable social impact.

The States' Startup Ranking is a periodic capacity building exercise developed and released by DPIIT that evaluates States and UTs on their efforts to build an ecosystem conducive to growth of startups. The major objectives of the ranking exercise are - facilitating States and UTs to identify, learn and replace good practices, highlighting the policy intervention by States and UTs for promoting startup ecosystem and fostering competitiveness among states.

DPIIT is also collaborating with the Department of Youth Affairs to promote the Mera Yuva Bharat (MY Bharat) initiative launched by the Prime Minister on 31st October 2023. MY Bharat is a pivotal, technology-driven facilitator for youth development and youth-led development across the entire spectrum of the Government. During the Innovation Week, various outreach activities specifically for My Bharat will be undertaken to promote entrepreneurship to the youth of the nation.

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