ON January 16 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the “Start-up India” movement which aims to encourage more start-up businesses in India. The start-up movement, according to the Indian Express Online dated January 16, 2016, will help boost digital entrepreneurship at the grassroots level, and is not linked to money or name and fame but finding solutions to the problems of common people. This is not only to encourage those with entrepreneurial capabilities but also those who are willing to take risks.
In the Philippines, as with India, for instance, some people have the ideas but do not have the resources to take the risks, particularly financial risks. First of all, there is the lack of capital. We all know that only those who has the capital resources can take the plunge and risk their financial resources to go into business. Those who lack financial capability have no choice but to be employed rather than become entrepreneurs.
The Start-up India movement has listed several concrete steps to make the project work. Initiators believe their people have many ideas, but some ideas remain as ideas because of the lack of needed boost to transform them to actions.
Our country should learn from the economy of India, the seventh-largest in the world by nominal GDP and the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). For the first time, India topped the World Bank’s growth outlook for 2014-2015, having grown 7.3 percent in 2014-2015 and expected to grow 7.5 percent to 8.3 percent in 2015-2016 (source: Wikipedia.org).
Although it is the fourth-largest start-up hub with over 3,100 technology start-ups in 2014-2015, India does not want to rest on its laurels. With this movement, India is aiming to be the No. 1. In fact, leaders foresee that, with the movement, they can create a bigger economic momentum than China’s in the next 10 years.
One of the assets of India is its young, English-speaking population who are mostly tech-savvy. This is the main reason India became No. 1 in the world as a major exporter of information-technology (IT) services, business-process outsourcing (BPO) services and software services with $167 billion worth of service exports in 2013-2014.
The Philippines possesses the same asset of English-speaking, educated young population. We may now be No. 1 in call-center services in the world, but India still stays on top with regards to IT services, BPO services, such as finance and accounting and software services. We can trace this success to several years ago, before outsourcing became popular, how the Indian government was already subsidizing and offering scholarships for IT courses. The government even set up schools to educate the people, especially those who cannot afford to study technology courses. That is why India is way ahead in the availability of young people with technical skills in IT compared to other countries.
And now they are launching this movement with action plans that involve dozens of policy
innovations.
The plans include income-tax exemption for start-ups for three years, no examination or inspection for three years with respect to labor and environment law compliance, availability of credit-guarantee funds, 80-percent rebate in patent costs, faster patent registration and protection for intellectual property rights, among others.
If our government or our future political leaders can muster the political will to drive our economy to further growth, the above action plan is not impossible to follow. As in business, we should be alert to see the trends that drive growth in other economies. Studies have shown that an economy can only grow if there are more entrepreneurs and if there is an increase in middle-income groups.
Furthermore, if we take a careful look at what drives growing economies to such tremendous growth, we can see that most of these economies do not only cater to global markets but also encourage new small businesses to grow.
The Philippines has a lot of potential for growth. We just have to be visionaries and learn from the more progressive countries—that is, learn from their successes and avoid their pitfalls.
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Wilma Miranda is the chairman of the Media Affairs Committee of Finex, managing partner of Inventor, Miranda & Associates, CPAs and treasurer of KPS Outsourcing Inc.
The opinions expressed herein are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of these institutions.