Make the techtonic shift for the techade

Nirmala Sitharaman has done well to urge startups to come up with affordable and scalable tech-driven solutions for the upcoming decade that will be India’s ‘Techade’ – technology-driven decade. The country has reaped the benefits of Digital India, starting with the success of early public initiatives like Aadhaar, Jan Dhan, India Stack, and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and United Payments Interface (UPI) for digital payments, along with increased internet and mobile penetration. Some startups have solved national problems cost-effectively and at scale, involving public funding or otherwise. Digital payments, where India has been able to scale up using Indian standards and innovation to bring a large-scale behavioural change, is another example.

Startup entrepreneurs need capital, mentors, network effect, local markets – and access to talent and skills. Early-stage funding, lowering barriers to procurement from startups including in deep-tech and strategic sectors, and ironing out road-block regulation to ease the fund flow from foreign investors are welcome. Policy initiatives in telecom and opening up of the space and defence sectors have meant rapid creation of domestic markets for tech and digital products and services. The missing piece – electronics manufacturing – is also being addressed. Public platforms are also coming up in many sectors with startups and large companies.

With its talent pool, India can develop the expertise to play a huge role in global digital transformation, provided these companies move up the value chain, acquire new skills and the capacity to innovate better ways of doing business. This includes their ability to deploy different emerging technologies in the offerings.