In order to promote social development initiatives and create more jobs, the government is planning a policy of creating a domestic venture capital industry.
Speaking at an event, Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Finance said, “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.”
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 added that the mandatory allocation of 2 per cent of net profit made by corporates as per the new Companies Act for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) will provide huge sums for various sectors.
“The two per cent corporate social responsibilityfunding 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 added.
Stating that creating jobs for the youth is the biggest challenge for the government, Sinha said every year around 10-12 million people enter the workforce.
Out of this, 5-6 million are graduates while only 1-2 million jobs are added in organised sector.
“There is a massive gap…we have to create jobs,” the minister said.
On environment issues, the minister said, “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.”
This article was taken from here.