Finance Minister Arun Jaitley launches Rs 12000-cr SIDBI funds to fire start-ups

“India is witnessing a startup revolution and to harness the potential of India’s innovators and entrepreneurs a vibrant financial ecosystem is essential”.

Mumbai: Terming the recent Parliament session as “virtually wasted”, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said policymakers and “obstructionist” politicians must gauge the public mood before taking a position on reforms. The idea behind the launch of SMILE scheme is to provide soft loans in the nature of quasi-equity and term loans on relatively soft terms to MSMEs to meet the required debt-equity ratio norm as also for pursuing opportunities of growth by existing MSMEs, a SIBDI release said. “We have already made a commitment of financing Rs 752 crore to start-ups and will be further mobilising Rs 8,620 crore under IAF and we are expecting to provide Rs 2,000 crore under the new scheme”, SIDBI chairman Kshatrapati Shivaji said.

“It is this mood of the country which will have to be gauged by policymakers and those who seem to be obstructionist in policies before they plan and conceive their future steps”, Jaitley said here at a function to launch a Fund of Funds for startups. The fund has committed up to Rs 60 crore in IvyCap Ventures, up to Rs 30 crore for Blume Ventures and up to Rs 20 crore for Carpediem Capital Partners, sources told ET.

Stressing on the need to create jobs in manufacturing and services sectors, the Finance Minister said India’s biggest competitor in manufacturing space, China, was facing high wage issues and this could be a “silver lining for India”.

“We have just seen extremely disappointing but a very educative session of Parliament come to an end…It was disappointing because what we thought would happen in this session did not happen…It was educative because it enabled us to understand the entire politics of reform process in India”, he said.

“It is time we set up some good conventions as to how do you get legislative sanctions”, he said. India’s largest insurance company LIC will be a coinvestor in the IAF.