With every new dawn, we see tremendous changes taking place in social, cultural and technological arena. From the adoption of green energy to scrapping section 377 to gene editing techniques, we have come a long way. These changes are greatly enhancing and regulating the societies as well as businesses. The operating methods of companies have changed significantly over time. While the changes are going to be undeniably beneficial to some businesses, there will be other businesses which will have to adapt themselves rapidly in order to keep themselves relevant.
Entrepreneurship in India is not alien to these changes and is also evolving rapidly with each passing day. Taking the discussion on entrepreneurship further, I want to discuss the future of entrepreneurship in India.
When we look 20 years back in time, young minds while choosing their careers didn’t even think entrepreneurship to be a plausible career option. Look at the situation now. If not most of us, a significant number of people consider entrepreneurship as a bright future prospect.
Talking about the first things first.
- Increasing internet penetration: keeping in mind the fact that entrepreneurship has now reduced down to just a laptop and an internet connection, people in India now have easy ways of entering into the startup world.
- The kind of development that India has made in the past decades in the field of entrepreneurship has set a level playing field for budding entrepreneurs. It is an undeniable fact that Indian entrepreneurs are creating a surfeit of opportunities today. They are providing offers in the form of jobs and readily helping associated domains in job creation. With the growth of the business, the associate domains such as hardware providers, infrastructure developer, IT workers and even the organization to which the work is outsourced are blooming while they make handsome profit.
- Keeping in mind the fact that India is going to surpass the population of China by 2027 to become the country with the largest population and the already existing fact that we have millions of IT workers with at least some command over technology, Indians have a bright future in IT entrepreneurship.
- Other sectors such as retail, entertainment, education, clothing, health care, energy, infrastructure etc. are witnessing effective entrepreneurship in India these days.
- Entrepreneurs are getting remarkable media attention which acts as a motivating factor for doing hard work. Struggle stories of successful entrepreneurs are being shared on social media, their success is celebrated and applauded by the media. Young entrepreneurs such as Ritesh Agarwal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Ranveer Alahabadia and Sairee Chahal are acting as role models for millions of Indians to have a startup of their own.
- Increasing preference of self-employment: young minds are now getting more conscious about the growth in self-employment. Further, the government of India is readily providing platform for young innovators such as Industry/Academia Support: Providing and building infrastructure across the country by setting/scaling up: 31 Innovation Centres, 15 Startup centres, 15 Technology Business Incubators, 7 Research Parks, 500 Atal Tinkering Labs.
The way India is handling new technology and socio-cultural changes is noteworthy. Also, the developments in entrepreneurship during the last two decades in Indian context is applauding and has contributed significantly to our National Income thereby increasing our GDP. India has now cracked the formula to set changes in motion.
If you’re thinking that every time India tried its hand at entrepreneurship, it has succeeded, then you might be wrong. Let me mention a few mistakes that we made in the past.
- In a nutshell, Indian eco-system tried to run before it learnt how to walk.
- Instead of trying to learn the basics of building a new business, we got obsessed by the Western culture of entrepreneurship and started chasing Venture Capitalists. VCs in turn raised huge funds to invest in Indian startups without taking into consideration the ground realities. This has amounted to shutting down of these startups.
- E-Commerce in India is a small industry still, relative to the US, Europe, or China. Businesses buy technology cautiously, drawing out sales cycles that deeply frustrate entrepreneurs trying to make ends meet. To build companies under these conditions requires patience, passion, conviction, blood, sweat, and tear.
Despite these shortcomings, India has been successful in keeping a pace with its entrepreneurial ups and downs. I think the future of entrepreneurship in India is blazing given the fact that we learn lessons from our mistakes in the past and find a pragmatic solution for them.