Govt plans to form VC industry to fund social sector projects

The government is planning to create a Venture Capital (VC) industry that will help fund social sector initiatives of sustainable development and job creation, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha said today.

"There is one thing that we are trying to do is to create domestic venture capital industry that will also be able to provide funding for impact funds. We will soon be announcing our efforts in that whole area of domestic venture capital where funds would be available for impact funds as well," he said at a function organised by Axis Bank Foundation here.

"The first aspect is the impact investment...There is funding available for most good businesses," he said.

'Impact investment' refers to investments made by organisations with the intention to generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact in a profitable manner.

Sinha further said that the 2 per cent allocation of profit made by companies as per the new Companies Act for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) will provide huge sums for social sectors.

"The 2 per cent CSR funding is going to be a game changer for NGOs in India because tremendous amount of money will be available...It would be thousands of crores," he said.

He said India is facing many challenges including job creation, climate change and lack of scalability and innovation.

"The first and foremost challenge that India faces is jobs. We understand...If we don’t create jobs, we have whole generation which would be jobless. Jobs are our single biggest challenge.

Climate change is irreversible...Water, soil cover are fairly irreversible things. So how do we have growth trajectory so that we can really be in tune with the ecological capacity that we have on this very densely populated sub-continent." he said.