Govt must provide business-friendly environment: Harsh Dhand

What’s interesting in the manifestos that have been released is the promise of creating five million jobs when most of them are created by start-ups and businesses and rarely by the government! Yet the promises continue. 

What the government can do, of course, is to encourage a business-friendly environment or provide genuine and achievable benefits like the state governments of Andhra, Telangana and Goa. 

The promise to promote K-Hubs across the state is a step in the right direction, but a lot more needs to be done like amending the Karnataka Shops and Establishment Act, providing affordable office infrastructure, ensuring women’s safety 24x7 and more. 

Bengaluru is the start-up capital of the country and is often compared to the Silicon Valley,  a distinction it has managed to achieve independant of  the political party in  power. Can we ensure that no matter what the election results are, the pressure to perform will remain on the government? It has been good to see people exerting pressure to complete an eight-year pending flyover in Hennur, and tree-huggers saving the natural heritage of the city  - all in a peaceful manner.

What has encouraged me personally in business over the last three years is the growth of events, government initiated and private across Bengaluru and neighbouring regions. 

I believe the state is next only to Gujarat and Delhi and can be promoted more. We need more BIEC-like set-ups across Karnataka. 

As a company we have supported the BBMP with laptops, television sets, projectors and tablets as it is becoming completely digital both pre- and post- elections. That’s a great trend to ensure lesser manual intervention.

In fact, Bengaluru can also become the electronics provider of the country . The state government will benefit a lot from this and it will also reduce the import burden of the rapidly growing IT city. The policy for secondhand products should be made clearer as this could start a whole re-commerce industry here, just like Flipkart led the e-commerce wave and is today recognised not just in India but globally.

(The author is the CEO and Founder of Rentsher.com, an online product rental marketplace, and an alumnus of IIT-Delhi)