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Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said deposits close to $ 1 billion attributable to Indian startups were with the US-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

The failure of the SVB, which was a key funding source for startups, has sent shockwaves across the global financial system.

During a Twitter live session, Chandrasekhar said he heard that over $200 million of startups’ deposits have been transferred to GIFT City bank.

“I had kind of very empirically and anecdotally calculated that there was more than a billion dollars of startups’ capital as deposits. According to some, this is a conservative estimate. There were deposits in SVB that are attributable to Indian startups close to a billion or more,” the Minister of State for Electronics and IT said.

Chandrasekhar held a consultation with more than 450 representatives of the startup and investor ecosystem on Tuesday to assess the impact of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Following this consultation, he wrote a letter to finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman with a set of suggestions to help startups wade through the crisis.

Chandrasekhar also said that he has taken up the issue of SVB failure with the Finance Minister on Wednesday and pitched for fine-tuning the Indian banking system as per the requirement of startups.

“There is a case to be made–and I have made this case to the finance minister yesterday when I sent her a summary of the consultations– hat the Indian banking system can be a lot more startup friendly by servicing and supporting startups with the same alacrity and quality that they provide to multibillion dollar companies,” Chandrasekhar said. “There is a need for the Indian banking system to consider Indian startups as an important client base and a target segment”.

Responding to a query, he said the country’s semiconductor journey is going to begin in 2023.

“We are going to ground break a fab (chip-making plant). We are going to create packaging units in India and by the end of the financial year 2023, I think, there will be more than 50-55 design startups that are doing device design,” Chandrasekhar said.

(Disclaimer: Additional information added to the copy)