In a phenomenal move, the Yogi Adityanath government of Uttar Pradesh has announced that Transgender in the state will soon get to inherit ancestral agricultural land. The state has cleared an amendment to the UP Revenue Code of 2006 for the same.
Likewise, the UP Government will promote start-up ventures of women and transgender under the new UP Startup Policy 2020 with additional incentives and institutional support.
The transgender community is immensely thankful to the government for the initiatives.
Right to inherit agricultural land
A revenue department official told the media that the state cabinet earlier this week cleared an amendment to the UP Revenue Code of 2006 for the inclusion of the third gender in the nomenclature. Earlier the code included only “sons, daughters, married, unmarried and widow”. It will become law once the legislature passes it, he said.
The state law commission had raised the demand for a law acknowledging the inheritance rights of the ‘third gender’ in March last year. It was Justice A.N. Mittal, chairman of the state law commission, who had drawn the attention of the state government toward the inheritance laws that left out the transgender, the officer added.
Following the amendment, the third gender will have succession and physical rights to the property. The amendments have been made in section 4 (10), 108 (2), 109, and 110 of the UP Revenue Code (Amendment) Act, 2020, the Revenue Department officials said.
Promotion of startups by transgender
Likewise, under UP Startup Policy, the government is targeting to set up 100 incubators covering all the 75 districts in UP with the goal of generating 150,000 employment and self-employment opportunities, including 50,000 direct jobs in the state.
The Policy was cleared by the state cabinet in July. Earlier on May 20, chief minister Yogi Adityanath had also launched the UP Startup Fund to be managed by the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).
As per reports, the Startup Fund has already started gaining traction, and it will soon start disbursing growth capital to UP based startups. SIDBI has so far received four applications from leading AIFs for an aggregate amount of Rs.285 crore to create the initial corpus. The decision on these applications will be taken by SIDBI and the Startup Nodal Agency in its first Venture Capital Investment Committee (VCIC) meeting.
As of now, the UP government has released Rs. 41 lakh to the Startup Nodal Agency to be disbursed among startups and incubators whose proposals were approved by the Policy Implementation Committee (PIU).
A corpus of Rs 150 crore has also been set up by the state government with the help of Abdul Kalam Technical University (AKTU) to fund startups.
For the same, a UP Angel Network and an online system were created for fresh entrepreneurs.