The employee responsible for retweeting two questionable posts on Twitter from the Centre's Startup India account resigned on Wednesday. Twitter users were left puzzled after the two tweets – one that asked for the Indian Army to be allowed to take care of "presstitutes" and another which said Rakhi Sawant is more useful to this nation than Meera (sic) Sood – were retweeted by the official handle. The government blamed the private agency hired to handle the account for the tweets.

The official government handle, however, apologised for the error. “We are here to create the world’s best startup ecosystem. Unwarranted & irrelevant retweets have been deleted. We do not endorse anything outside the startup ecosystem. Apologies to our followers,” it said.

On the microblogging site, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, "The unauthorised re-tweets were done by one employee of the agency duly hired by Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion through a tendering process. Person assigned by the agency for this particular job is not decided by the department and is the sole prerogative of the agency.” She said the inadvertent misdeeds of one person outside the department should not undermine the true spirit of Team Startup India, reported The Indian Express.