Praveen Chakravarty  writes in Mint: "The aim of creating fertile talent grounds for disruptive innovation is a lofty goal that is not easy to accomplish." Excerpts below:

"...3 trillion invested in roughly 3,000 start-ups in the past decade. There are more than 15,000 start-ups in the country. Start-ups that are valued at more than $1 billion are called unicorns. More than 90% of this funding in start-ups is by foreign venture capital funds. Forty percent of these start-ups are in Bengaluru. Eight out of the 107 unicorns in the world are India-originated or domiciled... 

Start-ups using technology to aggregate taxi services to food delivery generate hundreds of thousands of “gigs”, if not full-time jobs. This “gig economy”... can be substantially more vital in economies such as India, where net new job creation is abysmal. If there has been such an explosion of start-up activity over the past decade, driven entirely by the private sector, is there a need for government support or intervention at this stage?...

Surely, one’s beef about this could well be that all these are needed for any business... Perhaps, in the area of human capital, there can be a case made for minimal government interventions to breed innovation talent...

To be sure, the aim of creating fertile talent grounds for disruptive innovation is a lofty goal that is not easy to accomplish. Even in the US, attempts to recreate Silicon Valley in other states have not succeeded...

These governments also want to offer funding for such risky businesses and innovations... 

This public venturing idea has been tried in various countries over many decades with limited success. One of the first such public ventures was the United States Small Business Investment Company (SBIC), started in 1958. SBIC drew criticism for its low financial returns and squandering of taxpayer money with the inevitable frauds and scams that accompany these programmes...

In India, where there is a thriving private venture capital industry that has kicked off an innovation industry already, direct government funding using taxpayer money in venture capital funds will likely be a reckless use of the public exchequer... At best, the state can provide indirect financing in terms of tax exemptions to start-ups domiciled in its territory."