Win a national ideathon in India on Friday and there is nowhere to go on Monday morning. That sentence, more or less, is the problem a new policy framework sets out to fix. Released on 17 August 2026, it proposes a National Entrepreneurship Mission to create 10 lakh new enterprises and 30 to 36 lakh direct jobs over five years, not by launching another scheme but by connecting the startup, MSME, research, skilling and credit schemes India already runs. Titled Building India's Next 10 Lakh Entrepreneurs, it has been written by Shradha Sharma, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Bharat Project and YourStory Media. Across twelve sections it sets out an operating architecture, a table mapping which ministry and fund does what inside the Mission, a 15-month roadmap from Cabinet approval to national rollout, and a measurement framework. It is among the first implementation-ready frameworks of its kind, and it argues the Mission needs no significant new expenditure, because the money is already committed, only scattered. The diagnosis is that India has built an intervention for nearly every stage of a founder's journey and almost no bridges between them. A startup that receives a seed grant is not assigned a mentor once the money lands. A venture that reaches revenue has no structured route to its first big customer. Everything exists. Nothing connects. And the founders who make it today do so by stitching the system together themselves. What the National Entrepreneurship Mission would put in place One, a lifelong Entrepreneurship Passport built on the existing BHASKAR ID rather than beside it, carrying milestones, disbursals, repayment behaviour, revenue, jobs and closures. Two, an Entrepreneurship Opportunity Map for every district, answering what the district produces, what it imports that could be made locally, and which businesses can realistically be built there with Rs 1 lakh, Rs 5 lakh, Rs 25 lakh or Rs 1 crore. Three, a national Idea Bank seeded from those maps, for the aspirants who want to build something but do not yet know what. Four, an assigned mentor as a condition of disbursal for every publicly funded venture, with a multilingual AI co-pilot handling routine guidance and compliance questions routed to empanelled professionals rather than answered. Five, structured demand: a statutory set-aside on GeM rather than a guideline, a geographic sub-goal for non-metro districts, and an annual published scorecard grading every central ministry and public sector undertaking against a first-customer target. Six, outcomes verified against GST and EPFO records instead of self-declared returns. The targets are stated rather than implied. Of the 10 lakh enterprises, 6 lakh surviving and earning revenue at the end of year three. At least 60% from non-metro districts. One lakh graduating into DPIIT recognition. Opportunity Maps live in all 800-plus districts. Why the arithmetic is urgent rather than merely important India needs to create close t
