Start-up fever grips young tech-savvy Indians
New generation are capitalising on their parents’ hard-won financial security and going it alone in pursuit of their business dreams
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In the basement of a Bangalore building, hundreds of young Indians sit in neat rows of desks typing furiously, all dreaming of becoming the new Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.
A quarter of a century after liberalisation kick-started India’s economic transformation, a new generation of young people are capitalising on their parents’ hard-won financial security to try their luck in the risky business of tech start-ups.
“It’s really picking up,” says Aneesh Durg, a young Indian-origin student from Chicago who came to the southern tech hub of Bangalore to help develop a device that helps blind people read written text.
“It’s actually not what I expected it to be. I thought that they would be a little bit behind, but they are actually working just as hard and there’s really cool stuff coming out of India these days.”
India now has some 4,750 tech start-ups – the highest number in the world after the US and Britain, which it is fast catching up. Success stories include Flipkart, Amazon’s rival in India, and online supermarket Big Basket.
From robots and mobile apps to smart kitchens and a cocktail-making machine the cavernous Bangalore office, which houses one of India’s biggest start-up incubators, is a veritable ideas factory.
Every meeting room bears a photo of a successful technology entrepreneur.
Vikram Rastogi is a robotics expert who set up a small incubator named Hacklab after visiting the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014.
“I saw the kind of hardware work they were doing. We could also do the same kind of hardware work in India, it’s just that people do not pursue it much further,” he says.
“So I thought let me start with something in India and try to make global product out of it.”
But the path to building the next Google or Apple is not always smooth.
“When I started this we had a lot of people who came to us with start-up ideas,” Rastogi says, but he admits that some give up over time often due to family pressure to get a salaried job.
Sylvia Veeraraghavan, one of the millions who have migrated to Bangalore for work since the 1990s, is watching this new generation of self-starters with interest.
When she moved there, the city was becoming a outsourcing hub for Western technology companies seeking a cheap and well educated workforce through companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro.
“For me, for the people of my time, getting a job was a very big deal. The kind of values that we used to have are very different from the values that people have today,” said Veeraraghavan, who now works for a charity after a 25-year career in IT.
