Under the broader economic revival, BJP will accord high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship. We will… encourage and empower our youth for self-employment - incubating entrepreneurship as well as facilitating credit.

This entry arrived carrying a promise of "Startup India — single window registration, tax holiday and fund of funds", attributed to the 2014 manifesto. None of those words are in it. Startup India was launched on 16 January 2016, and the single-window portal, the three-year tax holiday and the Fund of Funds are features announced with the programme, not commitments made before it.

What the manifesto actually promises, in its employment and entrepreneurship section, is broader and vaguer: "BJP will accord high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship", including to "encourage and empower our youth for self-employment - incubating entrepreneurship as well as facilitating credit." That is the claim this fact-check grades, and the two verbs in it — incubating, facilitating credit — happen to be exactly what the programme that followed was built to do.

On scale, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade told the Lok Sabha on 28 July 2026: "As on 30th June 2026, 2,40,092 entities have been recognised as startups by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT)." Whatever else is disputed about the ecosystem, a recognition regime at that scale did not exist in 2014.

On incubation, the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme has been running since 1 April 2021: "As on 30th June 2026, 219 incubators have been selected under the Scheme and the complete corpus of Rs. 945 crore has been committed to these selected incubators. Further, the approved incubators have selected a total of 4,245 startups for support under the Scheme with a total approved funding of Rs. 706.33 crore." The corpus is fully committed, which is not something that can be said of every scheme in this corpus.

On credit, the Credit Guarantee Scheme for Startups has been operational since 1 April 2023, guaranteeing debt funding through banks, NBFCs and alternative investment funds.

Three things the record does not show, and which a reader should hold alongside the numbers. Recognition is a registration status: the answer gives no figure for how many of the 2,40,092 are still trading, and DPIIT recognition is not withdrawn when a startup shuts. Seed funding has reached 4,245 startups — under two per cent of those recognised — so for the overwhelming majority, the scheme's contribution is the recognition certificate and the tax and compliance benefits attached to it, not capital. And no CAG performance audit of the initiative has been tabled, so none of it has been independently verified.

Measured against the sentence actually in the 2014 manifesto — encourage self-employment, incubate entrepreneurship, facilitate credit — the institutions exist, at national scale, and they are funded. Our verdict is accurate, with the imported description of the promise corrected.