Jammu & Kashmir's startup reckoning: What the next chapter demands

A few weeks ago, this column laid out how Jammu & Kashmir built the foundation of a startup ecosystem: an institution in JKEDI that evolved from a training body into a full-spectrum enabler, a Startup Policy that moved from notification to real operational delivery in under a year, more than twenty-five venture capital funds engaging directly with local founders, university incubators taking root at IIT Jammu, SMVDU Katra, IUST Pulwama and SKUAST Kashmir, and more than 5,000 students walking into entrepreneurship boot camps across all 20 districts.

Building that foundation was the necessary first act. What comes next is harder and more important.

Foundations are not outcomes

The honest reckoning we owe ourselves, and the investors and stakeholders we are asking to engage seriously with this ecosystem, is that the next phase will be measured very differently from the last. Participation numbers built the case that entrepreneurship was possible here. What must now be demonstrated is that it is sustainable, scalable and competitive.

That means survival rates, not registration counts. Revenue trajectories, not pitch counts. Quality jobs created, not training sessions delivered. These are harder metrics to move, and we are not yet where we need to be on any of them.

The market access challenge

The market access challenge is perhaps the most consequential. J&K carries genuine competitive strengths in high-value agriculture, handicrafts, wellness, tourism and technology-enabled services, strengths rooted in geography, culture and craft that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. But strengths do not translate into markets without organised, sustained effort.

Too many of our best founders are still selling locally when they should be selling nationally, and selling nationally when they should have international ambition. Opening those pathways, through market linkage programmes, trade facilitation, e-commerce integration and strategic partnerships, is work we have begun but must significantly accelerate.

The follow-on capital gap

Seed funding opens a door; what lies on the other side of that door determines whether a venture survives or stalls. Of the roughly 1,400 startups registered under the current policy, the uncomfortable question is how many will still be operating in three years.

We do not yet have a strong enough answer. Strengthening angel networks, standardising due diligence practices and actively creating the conditions for Series A conversations are priorities for the near term, not aspirations for a future phase.

A major two-day investor summit is being planned to bring together investors, mentors, incubators and stakeholders from across the country, alongside work with partner incubators to institutionalise the less glamorous but essential infrastructure of investment readiness: governance standards, data room practices, and performance metrics.

The geography problem

Geography remains a structural challenge that good intentions alone cannot solve. The quality of mentorship, market connections and institutional support available to a founder in Srinagar or Jammu is meaningfully better than what is accessible to a founder in Kupwara or Kishtwar.

A startup ecosystem that concentrates its gains in urban centres while leaving district-level founders underserved is not yet an ecosystem; it is a cluster. We are committed to changing that, but commitment without delivery is precisely the kind of gap that erodes trust.

This year, four more university incubators will be added to extend coverage further across the region, and the Startup Idea Challenge is targeting 10,000 student participants, deliberately holding to the standard that a student in a remote district should have the same access to this experience as one in a major city.

The Under-18 Idea Challenge is, for the first time, moving into schools directly, reaching students before they have finished forming their beliefs about what they are and are not capable of. We name these gaps, market access, follow-on capital, geographic concentration- because the alternative, projecting confidence we have not yet fully earned, would undermine the credibility that makes everything else possible.

A different kind of progress

There is a tendency, in writing about regions like Jammu & Kashmir, to frame every development against a backdrop of difficulty, as if progress here is only meaningful because of where it is happening. That framing, however well-intentioned, misses something important and ultimately sells the region short.

The entrepreneurs emerging from J&K are not building in spite of the mountains. They are building. Full stop. And that — the act of construction itself, the choice to create rather than wait, is what the region's identity is increasingly becoming. Not a place defined solely by inherited beauty or inherited conflict, but a place of deliberately constructed futures.

Globally recognised startup ecosystems, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, and Silicon Valley, were not assembled quickly, and none of them arrived without false starts, structural challenges and years in which the outcome was genuinely uncertain.

They emerged through consistent institution-building, patient capital, capable founders and sustained public commitment across decades. They were built by people who kept going when the metrics were still unconvincing.

J&K has begun that journey in earnest. The foundations are laid. The challenges are known. The direction is no longer in question.

The climb remains real. But in ecosystems, as in mountaineering, knowing the route and having the right people on the rope is often more valuable than speed.

(The author heads the Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Business Modelling at the Jammu & Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute, and leads the implementation of the J&K Startup Policy 2024–27. Views expressed are personal.)