{"id":63570,"date":"2025-04-30T18:11:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T18:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/63570\/"},"modified":"2025-04-30T18:11:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T18:11:10","slug":"indias-start-ups-are-not-lacking-innovation-but-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/63570\/","title":{"rendered":"India\u2019s start-ups are not lacking innovation but imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Minister Piyush Goyal<\/a> recently lamented Indian start-ups\u2019 lack of \u201creal innovation,\u201d he triggered a familiar debate on bureaucratic red tape, R&D funding, and brain drain. Earlier in 2021, he had invoked \u201cEinstein\u2019s discovery of gravity\u201d to argue that innovation transcends structured formulas and past knowledge. The government\u2019s Startup India and the Atal Innovation Mission were meant to accelerate such entrepreneurial innovation at the national scale. India now boasts of 1,60,000+ registered start-ups, 1000+ incubators, an ever-expanding Digital Public Infrastructure (DPIs) that connects Aadhaar with everything, and 800 million internet users. Why are we still failing to imagine new progressive techno-futures?<\/p>\n

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We suspect the problem is not simply about policy or entrepreneurship, but a deeper failure of collective imagination. To put it bluntly, India lacks democratic horizons of techno-futurity. India\u2019s elites have reduced innovation to the latest mobile app or AI wrappers, equating innovation with Silicon Valley mimicry. It seems India has instrumentalised start-ups as mere props for national pride. For example, NITI Aayog\u2019s recent seven-page \u201cR&D Vision 2035\u201d calls to urgently emulate China\u2019s \u201cDeepTech\u201d frontiers. This vision reveals a mindset of catch-up, not confidence in charting an independent path to imagining techno-futures for the collective good.<\/p>\n

Let us consider UPI, the oft-cited proof of India\u2019s innovation potential. India has been pitching DPIs to the world as revolutionary alternatives to Western Big Tech. However, the global response has been underwhelming. Beyond the hype, there are still questions about UPI\u2019s sustainability in the absence of government support. FinTech scams ruining the lives of Indians add to the worry. The vision of public-private partnerships behind DPIs offers hope, but the abuse of \u201copen source\u201d and opacity in industry partnerships through \u201cvolunteers\u201d hardly inspires confidence. Why, despite being the fastest-growing major economy, is India unable to convert its tech potential into global competitiveness? Beyond the goal of linking everything to Aadhaar, is there a shared, long-term technological vision of Startup India, Digital India, or the recently retired Smart Cities mission?<\/p>\n

Such vision-agnostic digitalisation is symptomatic of a narrow social imagination that privileges a small minority of elites to dictate the rest of India\u2019s techno-futures. Outsourcing the work of imagining transformative techno-futures to this small group not only leaves behind most Indians in terms of representation but also impoverishes India\u2019s collective capacity to imagine techno-futures differently from American and Chinese paradigms.<\/p>\n

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It is tempting to credit start-ups alone with breakthroughs, but history disagrees. India\u2019s IT services boom emerged not from lone entrepreneurs but from decades of government support for English and engineering education, STPI\u2019s satellite internet links, tax exemptions, and economic liberalisation. OpenAI became possible because of the Canadian government\u2019s sustained funding for Geoffery Hinton\u2019s AI research. But current debates in India obfuscate such facts. The Silicon Valley model demands start-ups chasing rapid scalability and quick exits, seldom supporting the long term exploratory research needed for paradigm-shifting discoveries. As a result, India\u2019s ecosystem produces countless copies chasing the growing disposable income of the top 5 per cent of Indians.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s deep systemic inequalities, sub-continental scale, and federal architecture necessitate greater (not lesser) government intervention to prevent innovation from becoming a billionaire-driven agenda like in the USA. This requires reimagining the government\u2019s role at the federal and state levels to open more democratic horizons for imagining new techno-futures. We need forums where farmers, gig workers, artisans, ASHAs, Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, as well as scientists and engineers, can dialogue. Such experiments may not yield short-term results, but our current approach is bound to fail in the long term.<\/p>\n

Innovation thrives in democratised knowledge ecosystems \u2014 libraries, labs, mentorship networks, and societies\u2019 orientation to the public good. India\u2019s knowledge infrastructure is starved, with academics having little say in running institutions. Approximately 40 per cent of faculty positions at premier institutes remain vacant, and public libraries receive a mere Rs 0.07 per capita annually. Indian high-net-worth individuals rarely support existing universities. This leaves the majority of our education and research vulnerable to stagnation from the mediocrity of the few who get to have an outsized influence. Without mentors or community learning spaces, aspiring innovators of Bharat who do not have caste capital lack environments to experiment, fail, and iterate, thereby severely constricting our collective potential and possibilities.<\/p>\n

Instead of democratising, India has centralised innovation by implementing Startup India\u2019s programmes in hundreds of small cities in a top-down fashion. Over 90 per cent of venture funding flows to Bengaluru<\/a>, Delhi<\/a> NCR, and Mumbai<\/a>. The government is the biggest facilitator of the start-up ecosystem in tier-2 and -3 cities. However, they have handed over the work of running incubators to consultants who have little expertise in non-managerial forms of innovation. In our research, we have interviewed scores of entrepreneurs complaining about the lack of a \u201cculture of entrepreneurship\u201d in small cities as the primary reason behind their failure. Cultural dimensions of innovation and entrepreneurship cannot be downloaded from Bengaluru. They require long-term investments in education, health, and social infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Compounding India\u2019s spatial inequality, caste, and gender inequalities exclude the majority of citizens from even participating in technological future-making. Recently, Apple<\/a>\u2019s investment under the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme highlighted the inadequate human capital to \u201cMake in India\u201d. Indian manufacturing underperforms because industrial policy debates rarely reckon with the realities of human capital availability. More than 35 per cent of children are stunted, over 50 per cent of women are anaemic, and 25 per cent of high-school graduates struggle to read. Alarmingly, critical socio-economic indicators seem to be declining even after tangible improvements in welfare goods in recent decades. Despite India Stack, the absence of the 2021 census makes data-driven innovation in governance practically impossible. India\u2019s existing welfare architecture has the potential to include the India that is Bharat in improving innovation outcomes for the world. But for that, policy areas such as welfare programs, taxation, and MSME, among others, must be enmeshed in R&D visions, industrial policy, and start-up ecosystem.<\/p>\n

We are not promoting a Maslovian hierarchy of needs where only after redistribution should India do start-ups. We are suggesting a rethinking of how India imagines its futures, its place in the world, and which Indians get to imagine it. Bharat is not involved in these conversations today. The Indus Valley annual report, published by Blume Ventures, which vertically classified the country into India 1, 2, and 3, sees India 2 and 3 as passive recipients of India 1\u2019s offerings. It does not question India 1\u2019s capacity to imagine transformative futures. The next disruptive innovation \u2014 whether climate resilient crops, energy independence, or the discovery of new materials \u2014 is unlikely to spring from an exclusive club of elite entrepreneurs. It is especially unlikely to come from blindly following or even customising the American or the Chinese model to the Indian context. It will need a democratically generated social compact beyond the performativity of MyGov comment requests, that reimagines innovation first as a social and democratic process.<\/p>\n

Only by weaving start-ups into a broader social and federal tapestry can India reimagine its techno futures beyond a mimicry of the USA\u2019s Elon Musk model or China\u2019s state-controlled economy. We need more than \u201cDeepTech\u201d; we need a deep democracy of innovation, responsive to domestic realities and global challenges, that involves every Indian \u2014 from an Adivasi girl in Hasdeo forest to an entrepreneur in a government start-up incubator in Jaipur \u2014 to shape our shared futures.<\/p>\n

Mertia is professor of science, technology, and society at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA. Solanki is doctoral researcher in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Both are alums of the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar<\/a>, Gujarat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Minister Piyush Goyal recently lamented Indian start-ups\u2019 lack of \u201creal innovation,\u201d he triggered a familiar debate on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[32754,32760,26406,32752,51,32750,31,32759,32753,3134,3672,32757,730,32761,32763,1302,32758,32755,32751,10689,4806,32756,32748,32749,16,15,9300,32762],"class_list":{"0":"post-63570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-aadhaar","9":"tag-bharat","10":"tag-brain-drain","11":"tag-bureaucratic-red-tape","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-collective-imagination","14":"tag-democracy","15":"tag-democratisation","16":"tag-digital-public-infrastructure","17":"tag-entrepreneurship","18":"tag-fintech","19":"tag-government-intervention","20":"tag-india","21":"tag-india-stack","22":"tag-industrial-policy","23":"tag-innovation","24":"tag-knowledge-ecosystems","25":"tag-public-private-partnerships","26":"tag-rd-funding","27":"tag-research-and-development","28":"tag-silicon-valley","29":"tag-social-inequality","30":"tag-start-ups","31":"tag-techno-futures","32":"tag-uk","33":"tag-united-kingdom","34":"tag-upi","35":"tag-welfare-programs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}