If you’re trying to set up your own start-up, the top locations that will come to your mind first may include cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune. But did you know that Kolkata has also become one of the best breeding grounds for start-ups? In fact, the City of Joy has already given birth to a significant number of leading start-ups in the country, including SastaSundar, Mihup, and mPokket.
But what helped Kolkata to achieve this position? Let’s take a look.
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Presence of government and private initiatives
For any start-up to grow and sustain, government and private initiatives play an extremely crucial role, and in Kolkata, there’s no shortage of them. West Bengal Government’s initiative Startup Bengal has been promoting the entrepreneurial culture by providing start-ups with a broad range of resources required to grow. IIM Calcutta Innovation Park (IIMCIP) promotes entrepreneurship and innovation by offering both physical and virtual incubation. Another popular initiative is TCGTBI that helps start-ups transform tech ideas into products, services, and processes that can be used commercially.
A robust pool of highly skilled professionals
Kolkata has a large number of leading institutions in a diverse range of fields – from engineering and medical to business management and technology. Therefore, a solid pool of highly skilled workforce is readily available to support start-ups, regardless of the industry they’re in. Some of the reputable educational institutions also regularly organize different networking events to promote different start-ups while ensuring the quality of those ventures.
Low operational costs
In Kolkata, the operational cost is the lowest of any other metropolitan city, which is one of the key factors promoting its start-up ecosystem. And in the context of low operational costs, the importance of coworking spaces in Kolkata cannot be overlooked. You can choose a good coworking space filled with amenities at a prime location to run your start-up by paying a fraction of what you’d in other major cities. Whether you need hot desks or dedicated desks on an hourly or daily basis or require a cabin to accommodate your small team, you can easily find a coworking space that offers these solutions.
Availability of a large number of start-up investors
We all know that one of the biggest obstacles for most start-ups is to accumulate enough funding to transform their ideas into reality. In Kolkata, there’s no shortage of angel investors and venture capital firms. The West Bengal Government also has schemes to provide start-ups with early-stage funding. Moreover, the government has taken steps to make sure that start-ups and emerging entrepreneurs are aware of the available facilities and made the laws favourable to these ventures. It also has various schemes for MSMEs to promote the entrepreneurial culture in the state.
In addition to these, Kolkata has a low cost of living, good transport facilities and boasts one of the well-developed infrastructures in the country. These are some of the key reasons why start-ups find Kolkata one of the best places to thrive and start operating from here.
