Prodyut Bora, the political adviser to Assam PCC president, has in a letter to Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal said that institutions tasked with supporting startups in the Northeast and Assam were “not” delivering on their mandate.
Bora was responding to Goyal’s controversial observation at a startup event in Delhi last week that the Indian startup ecosystem was focusing more on delivery services than deep-tech innovation like China.
In a two-page letter to Goyal as a “former colleague and a current entrepreneur”, Bora congratulated Goyal “on the bold stand” he took during the Startup MahaKumbh event in Delhi on Thursday “regarding the direction Indian entrepreneurship is taking.”
“As you have implied, capital in India is chasing pakoda manufacturing, over solving the country’s current and future challenges. Somebody had to show the mirror to the moneybags sitting on tons of capital, and you did. So, thank you once again!” Bora said in the letter shared with The Telegraph on Sunday.
He then points out: “But you should have also reflected on deployment pattern of the Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS), approved by the Cabinet, and established by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) in June 2016. Are you aware where and how the money is being spent?”
Goyal had said at the startup event in Delhi: “Are we going to be happy being delivery boys and girls... Is that the destiny of India... this is not a startup, this is entrepreneurship... What the other side is doing — robotics, machine learning, 3D manufacturing and next generation factories,” Goyal had said. “We are focused on food delivery apps, turning unemployed youths into cheap labour so the rich can get their meals without moving out of their house,” he had added.
Bora, who had left the BJP in 2015 to float the Liberal Democratic Party, which merged with the Congress in 2023, cited examples of his home state Assam, claiming the main institution “mandated” to support startups in the Northeast, NedfiVenture Capital, “is out of money”.
“They have not made a new investment in the whole of last year,” he pointed out, adding that the “SIDBI Venture Capital signed an MoU with the Assam Government in 2021 for a ₹100 crore Agri Fund, but is yet to deploy a single rupee. Possibly, they have not found a pakoda manufacturer in Assam! I wrote to the CMD of SIDBI a couple of months back but have not heard from him yet”.