India, Jan. 25 -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi marked the first Mann Ki Baat of 2026 on Sunday with a throwback to 2016, tapping into a popular social media trend to recall the launch of Start-up India and highlight the transformation of India's start-up ecosystem over the past decade.

Referring to posts where people are reliving memories from 2016, Modi said he too wanted to share a memory from January that year, when the government launched an "ambitious journey" that many did not fully understand at the time - Start-up India. Today, Modi said, India has become the world's third-largest start-up ecosystem, with young entrepreneurs working in sectors that were "unimaginable even 10 years ago", including AI, space, nuclear energy, semico...