PM Modi's 76th birthday: 17 moves powering India's journey from Startup India to Build India

For most of the last decade, the conversation was about starting up: entrepreneurship, venture capital, unicorns, digital businesses. The conversation today runs deeper. Who will build India's AI models? Who will design its chips? Who will fund its laboratories, its rockets, its biotech platforms, its quantum computers? And can the next generation of entrepreneurs come from every district, not only Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai? Over the past twelve years, and with particular intensity in the past twelve months, the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been answering those questions with capital, compute and missions. On his 76th birthday, here are 17 moves that matter to India's builders, and what they set up for the decade ahead. 1. Rs 1 lakh crore for research and innovation The Research, Development and Innovation Fund may prove the most consequential intervention of the year. It is built to bring long-term, low-cost capital into hard areas: AI, quantum, robotics, space, biotech, energy. The Cabinet approved it on 1 July 2025 and the PM launched it on 3 November 2025 at ESTIC, with Rs 20,000 crore earmarked for FY26. Money is now moving: the Technology Development Board signed its first agreements with five deeptech companies and made the first disbursement on 13 May 2026. Why it matters: India has never lacked entrepreneurial ambition. Deeptech needs the harder thing, patient capital. 2. Another Rs 10,000 crore for the startup capital stack In February, the Cabinet approved Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0 with a Rs 10,000 crore corpus, prioritising deeptech, tech-driven manufacturing, early-growth founders and investment beyond the major metros. The next startup cycle is being designed to look different from the consumer-internet cycle that produced India's first unicorns. Equity cannot fund everything. The Credit Guarantee Scheme for Startups doubled its maximum cover per borrower from Rs 10 crore to Rs 20 crore in FY26, and by the end of the year more than 410 loans worth over Rs 1,250 crore had been guaranteed. For founders, this means growth capital that does not always cost ownership. 4. Public capital kept pulling private capital behind it The original Fund of Funds shows how government can back startups without picking them. By the end of FY26, more than Rs 7,000 crore had gone to over 135 AIFs, which in turn invested more than Rs 26,900 crore in over 1,420 startups. Nearly four rupees of private money for every public rupee. FoF 2.0 aims to repeat that multiplier for deeptech. 5. AI compute became national infrastructure The biggest barrier to serious AI companies is no longer talent. It is compute. Under the IndiaAI Mission, more than 38,000 GPUs are available to startups and researchers at a subsidised rate of about Rs 65 an hour, with another 20,000 announced in February and a stated target of 100,000 by December 2026. Build the rails, let entrepreneurs build on top. India is now backing indigenous foundation models ra

Original source: YourStory