India's Tough But Lasting FAST-TRACK TO 2047

Building resilient capital, stronger talent pools, and globally competitive enterprises will define India's startup journey to 2047

- By Kartik Reddy

THE SUCCESS OF THE Asian economies since World War II has ridden on the twin aspects of innovation, manufacturing-led exports and wowing the world enough to pay for the hard work of the local populations. Waiting for local populations to pay for our own prowess takes too long. India's largest raw material for innovation and growth? It's people!

Building Innovation Infra

For way too long, we exported the best of our minds to corners of the earth, whereas we should've been fostering innovation playgrounds and fuelling it with capital on the ground here. Until we bridge that gap, we will push cutting-edge innovators and talent outside the country.

To assert that India's ease of doing business is improving would be an exaggeration at best and a lack of perspective at worst, relative to what economies like Korea, Japan, Vietnam and China had to do to drive scaled manufacturing of the highest quality, not just be dependent on labour-intensive low-margin manufacturing.

We need to reverse engineer the environments that train and then retain the best minds onshore. This means massive efforts at scaling cutting-edge manufacturing and innovation industries and enabling entrepreneurs and knowledge workers beyond IT to mushroom across the country. Enabling capacity building in the hands of a few industrial conglomerates won't compound fast enough. We need thousands of scaled companies, not a dozen or two.

Unshackling Capital, Talent

This requires unshackling capital, talent, and wowing the world to pay for the best-in-class products in the world, winning beyond boundaries.