Indian Railways ready to create a sandbox for encouraging startups: Ashwini Vaishnaw

Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Minister for Railways and Information Technology, said on Thursday that the Indian Railways is setting a policy for instituting a sandbox to encourage start-ups.

What is a sandbox for startups?

A sandbox is a safe and controlled environment where businesses can experiment while the risk of regulatory penalties or legal repercussions is minimised.

It allows developers and testers to try out new features, fix bugs, and validate changes in a controlled environment, minimising risks. It also refers to a controlled environment where businesses can experiment while the risk of regulatory penalties or legal repercussions is minimised.

Speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) annual business summit, Vaishnaw said, “Maybe in another two months from now, we’ll have a new policy where any new innovative idea can be tried and tested at a small scale, in a sandbox environment, and then we can scale it up to a bigger level.”

He remarked that the upcoming sandbox policy builds upon the experience gained from using start-ups in Railway procurement.

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How creating a sandbox will help the Indian startup ecosystem?

“The results have been very encouraging,” Ashwini Vaishnaw said while adding that the national transporter has been onboarding start-ups over the last one and a half years.

Under the ‘Startups for Railways’ initiative, as of early May 2025, the total entities registered on the innovation portal was around 3166, including applications from startups at 363.

From 1977, individual innovators from 215 MSMEs, 169 R&D organisations and institutes, around 59 proprietorship, partnership firms, companies or consortiums, 65 NGOs, among others. [Source: The Hindu Businessline]

A total of 131 workshops and meetings on Indian Railway Innovation Policy have been organised, including by the zonal railways, in which 1560 start-ups and innovators participated.

Recently, Minister Vaishnaw announced that India is developing 25 chipsets with indigenous intellectual property (IP) to fight cyberattacks. 13 projects led by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bengaluru, are underway.

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