From classrooms to startup founders

In 2014, India counted a few hundred startups. By January 31, 2026, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade had recognised 212,283 of them; the count has since crossed 2.40 lakh, with over 23.36 lakh direct jobs created by the close of the financial year — enough to make India the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem. FY26 alone added more than 55,200 recognised startups, the highest in any year since Startup India was launched in 2016, and a rise of nearly 52 per cent over the previous year. The Union Budget for 2026-27 has backed this trajectory with capital rather than applause: a further Rs 20,000 crore for the Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund; a Rs 10,000 crore SME Growth Fund; and a sharpened focus on deep tech, semiconductors and frontier sectors.

Behind that arithmetic lies a question higher education has not yet answered at scale: where do founders actually come from?

They come from classrooms. Almost every founder in that 2.40 lakh was, a few years earlier, a student being prepared, quite deliberately, for employment rather than enterprise. That is the gap. India has built world-class instruments for funding a startup once it exists. What it has not built, uniformly, is a university system that treats the making of one as a legitimate academic outcome.

This is a design problem, not a resource problem — and design problems have solutions that can be copied.

For instance, institutional case studies from universities illustrate the impact of long-term academic restructuring around enterprise building. Students have earned over Rs 20 crore through startups, freelancing, consultancy, paid internships and innovation grants, resulting in over 400 student-launched ventures. Additionally, more than 15,000 students now participate in experiential learning models rather than traditional classroom routes.

During a campus investor event, student-led startups raised Rs 2.65 crore, while enterprises such as Femora AI and Macbease were featured at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. Notably, alumnus Anirudh Sharma co-founded space-tech company Digantara, securing $12.5 million in venture funding to build space-surveillance satellite infrastructure.

None of that is accidental, and none of it came from motivational lectures. It came from changing the rules of the degree itself.

A student can now earn up to half of their academic credits through experiential learning. Attendance is relaxed for founders whose ventures cross Technology Readiness Level Six, and academic relaxations follow DPIIT registration. Scholarships are calibrated not to examination marks but to monthly startup revenue, grants received, private investment raised and intellectual property granted — a venture earning above Rs 8 lakh a month or attracting Rs 10 lakh in investment can carry a full programme fee waiver. Three incubators, from a NIDHI Technology Business Incubator to an MSME-supported facility, sit on the same campus as the classrooms. In short, the university stopped treating a company as a distraction from the degree and started treating it as evidence of one.

The return here is measurable. A generation trained to build rather than only to apply will create employment instead of queuing for it - and India’s demographic advantage, the youngest large workforce in the world, will convert into an entrepreneurial one only if its campuses are wired for it.

A cap table is a short document listing who owns what and who was willing to build it. The task before Indian higher education, between now and 2047, is straightforward: make certain that the names on those documents are increasingly the students’ — and that they got there because their university helped, not despite it.

For this approach to become national practice rather than an institutional exception, four things must change:

• Academic Credit for Enterprise: Entrepreneurship must carry academic credit as a matter of course – a registered venture, a granted patent, or a shipped prototype should count towards a degree exactly as an examination does.
• District-Tied Incubators: Every institution should operate a functioning incubator tied to the industry of its own district, not a nameplate on a corridor.
• Early Campus Risk Capital: Risk capital must reach the campus at the stage where Rs 5 lakh decides more than Rs 5 crore later; the Budget’s new funds need an explicit academic channel.
• Academic Fail-Safes: Failure must be made academically survivable so that a student whose venture folds in the sixth semester loses a company, not a year.

The writer is Pro-Chancellor, LPU; Views presented are personal.