Indian Financing Must Drive Start-up Movement, Can't Depend On Foreign Funds: Kant

The Indian start-up movement must be driven by Indian financing and cannot depend on foreign funding, G20 Sherpa Amitabh Kant said on Thursday.

While speaking at a CII Unicorn Summit, Kant said the nation needs to create a fund of funds to support young deep tech start-ups. All upcoming start-ups have to be driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), he said.

Start-ups should focus on corporate governance for growth, otherwise, they will land up in a debacle, the former NITI Aayog CEO said.

"In the quest for great innovation and disruption, start-ups lose out on corporate governance. The key to India’s success of becoming the number one nation of start-ups is our ability to do good corporate governance and to ensure that Indian insurance companies, pension funds, and others, should all invest in our start-up movement," he said.

Kant added that India cannot grow on the back of foreign money coming in all the time. "India’s start-up movement must be driven by India’s financing,” he said.

"We must be very clear about being the number one start-up nation in the world. There is no reason that anything should hold us back because we have created a digital movement that is more powerful than anything else in the world.

He also said women are outperforming men in every walk of life, and if India wants to be a $35 trillion economy by 2047, it cannot do so without women's participation.