I am not entirely sure how we got to this point, but in the span of a week, we\u2019ve discovered that vegan ice cream and gluten-free cookies are the only roadblocks preventing India from being a leader in the deep tech startup space.<\/p>\n
Piyush Goyal, India\u2019s Minister of Commerce and Industry, recently admonished a hall full of startup founders at Startup Mahakumbh 2025. Wearing a full face of disappointment, Goyal posed a rhetorical question that has since sent LinkedIn and Reddit abuzz: \u201cSo, what does India want to make? Ice cream or semiconductor chips?\u201d<\/p>\n
During his presentation, Goyal also showed<\/a> a slide comparing startups in India and China. He claimed that Indian startups were preoccupied with \u201cfood delivery apps, fancy ice cream & cookies, instant grocery delivery, betting & fantasy sport apps, and reels & influencer economy,\u201d whereas their Chinese counterparts were focused on electric vehicles, semiconductors, AI, and robotics.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tShow Full Article<\/p>\n There\u2019s something deliciously mordant about a minister standing before India\u2019s most successful non-conformists, only to scold them for conforming a little too successfully.<\/p>\n The minister\u2019s admonishment triggered a cacophony of reactions and counter-reactions. Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola and Aman Gupta of boAt dutifully applauded Goyal, happy to align themselves with the official narrative of \u201caiming higher.\u201d<\/p>\n Also read: <\/strong>In Meerut, \u2018startup culture\u2019 means hard-to-get loans, low demand, misplaced hope<\/a><\/p>\n Minister gets a reality check<\/b> Not everyone was eager to swallow though. Aadit Palicha, the CEO of Zepto, wrote on X that his company had created over 1.5 lakh jobs and contributed over Rs 1,000 crore in taxes each year, labelling it a \u201cmiracle in Indian innovation\u201d. (For his troubles, Palicha received<\/a> a lecture all his own from BJP leader Praveen Khandelwal, who said \u201cclaiming to create jobs and pay taxes while burning foreign capital to dismantle India\u2019s small neighbourhood kirana stores is not innovation.\u201d) Former BharatPe managing director, Ashneer Grover, went a step further to take a swipe at the government: \u201cIt\u2019s great to aspire for what they [China] have done \u2014 maybe time for politicians to aspire for 10%+ economic growth rate for 20 years flat before chiding today\u2019s job creators.\u201d<\/p>\n These exchanges, flying thick and fast, perfectly mirrored our national inability to have an honest conversation. Meanwhile, the minister\u2019s unkind remarks opened the floodgates for several founders to unveil the reality of \u201cease of doing business\u201d in India. Murtaza Amin, who runs an IT services company, BizProspex, in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, wrote about relentless bureaucratic harassment<\/a> in a widely read X thread. Amin stated that he and his coworkers were \u201ctreated like 3rd grade citizens by babus\u201d who demanded bribes for everything. \u201cAren\u2019t we building digital India? Or is that a jumla for commoners like us?\u201d he asked<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another founder in a semiconductor startup directly addressed Goyal<\/a> in an open letter on Reddit: \u201cYour department sat on my application for over 2 years and returned it\u2026asking for \u201cAdditional documents\u201d with a note that after submitting the documents my application will again go to the back of the queue (i.e. another 2 years)! Within a few hours of your rejection I got a call from a \u201cfacilitator\u201d who promised me quick and guaranteed results if I use their service for \u201cpreparing my documents\u201d!\u201d<\/p>\n The most frustrating aspect of this debate, though, is that Goyal\u2014despite his withering tone\u2014is absolutely right. Yes, India\u2019s deep tech landscape is sparse compared to China\u2019s robust ecosystem of over 6,000 companies<\/a> that have collectively raised nearly $100 billion. Yes, we have disproportionately focused on consumer-facing apps that serve the rich thanks to a vast pool of exploitable labour with no viable choice. The data bears this out unambiguously<\/a>: only about 5 per cent of total funding in our startup ecosystem goes to deep tech, compared to 35 per cent in China. And yes, \u201c77 per cent of venture capitalists report<\/a> that many Indian startups lack pioneering innovation based on new technologies or unique business models.\u201d<\/p>\n But wagging fingers at startup founders fails to acknowledge the complex web of structural barriers that systematically choke innovation in infancy. Goyal\u2019s comparison with China conveniently omits that the Chinese government invested in a 20-year vision<\/a> to develop an ecosystem where deep tech could flourish. India\u2019s research and development expenditure, meanwhile, hovers at a paltry 0.6-0.7 per cent of GDP.<\/p>\n Also read: <\/strong>Can\u2019t rely on foreign investors. India must become aatmanirbhar in startup financing<\/a><\/p>\n Killing innovation at every step<\/b><\/p>\n Systematic innovation doesn\u2019t emerge overnight from ministerial directives. It grows through years of intentional cultivation. And India\u2019s social and cultural landscape is fundamentally antithetical to the idea of innovation.<\/p>\n The first frontier is the family, which discourages any risk-taking, followed closely by India\u2019s education system, designed to suffocate any creative impulse. From the earliest years, schools reward memorisation over meaning. In these cognitive prisons, divergent thinking is actively punished. Students learn quickly that questioning the teacher or exploring tangential ideas leads to lower marks. All this while, the muscle of creative thinking atrophies.<\/p>\n Vidhi Jain, co-founder of Shikshantar, a centre aimed at \u201cunschooling\u201d, recalls<\/a> an art workshop with young children who reproduced the same mountain-sun-river picture plastered across the walls of every Indian institution. When children are taught that their worth is measured by their ability to reproduce textbook knowledge and even fun is standardised, why are we surprised when they grow into adults who struggle to colour outside the lines?<\/p>\n By the time these students reach adulthood, they\u2019ve internalised a profound risk aversion. We have engineering graduates with no sense of history and business students who can only parrot case studies. These are not failures of individual imagination but predictable outcomes of our educational methodology. This is how we end up with a \u201cdemographic dividend\u201d that is hardly employable<\/a>, and a Global Innovation Index rank<\/a> of 39.<\/p>\n The very skills that are essential for deep tech innovation \u2014 a certain comfort with uncertainty, multidisciplinary thinking, and a massive tolerance for failure \u2014 are routinely extinguished. Ironically, India\u2019s enormous engineering talent has been poised to take on the challenges posed by \u201cthe coming wave<\/a>\u201d.\u00a0After all, our brilliant minds power innovation in other countries that makes its way back here, while the rest of us are trained to execute rather than envision.<\/p>\n