Exempt GST for healthcare startups: Eyestem

By Dr Jogin Desai, Founder and CEO of Eyestem

The government of India should invest in creating a plug and play product development hubs for newer treatments like cell and gene therapy on the lines of the UK (https://ct.catapult.org.uk/) and Canada (https://www.ccrm.ca/)

GOI should invest in providing national-level access to the science community for journal subscriptions which are prohibitively expensive.

ESOPs should be taxed only at the time of sale. Taxation at an earlier stage (at vesting) prevents startups from fully vesting these with employees which is essential to provide reassurance of ownership of the options.

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True innovation should be categorised and treated differently and scaling grants through entities like the National BioPharma mission should be fast-tracked with the GOI taking a royalty based stake in return. A monitoring mechanism should consist of government and expert staff sourced from industry considering the dynamic nature of such research.

GST should be exempted for startups that import reagents and capital goods for innovative research. Currently, only academic institutes are eligible for such preferential GST treatment.

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