Why has India failed to produce Tech Giants such as Google, Facebook etc?
This is the most common discussion among youth from Startup world in India. My answer is simple:
Because we didn’t need Apple or Google or Facebook or Twitter in India.
Disclaimer : My answer has not assumed “Tech” Entrepreneur means people are into computer science or software. I have considered Tech as everything related to science/technology.
Most of the people usually majorly complain about Indian education system or Indian ecological system, etc. However, I think the single reason for entrepreneur to build something is because of the need.
Considering the problems that India is facing right now and has faced in its last decade such as Poverty, Energy, Education etc. We didn’t want a website which let you search something over the internet or a platform which helps you connect with long distant friend. We need to find new resources for energy, find ways to make people more literate, find ways to fill the hunger of poor.
The internet penetration in India was only 14.2% as of March 2013 which was 10.9% a year before that(Considering every form of internet 2G Dial-up etc) ! I agree however, that still we are third largest consumer of the internet and there is a huge market in India for the internet products now. However, considering the time when Facebook and Google were being built in USA, in India people were having power-cut because of energy shortage!
I find it really stupid even to think that we were/are not entrepreneurial, if you ever talk to a taxi owner/driver or a guy who started his own Dhaba or even a fruit shop, you’ll find that his life was much harder than a guy sitting in Harvard writing Facebook. why? Because he didn’t get education or because his father never had money to feed his whole family. Now you say..who asked him to give birth to so many kids? Because he was never educated enough to use a condom, and he can’t really discuss such thing in India because even to talk about sex in India is a taboo. There was never proper sex “education” .
Consider following article from Wikipedia:
It tells percentage of people living on less than 2$ per day as of 2009. For India, it says it belongs to 61–80%.
This is an article from 2009 TOI : India tops world hunger chart.
In a country where people are hungry and poor, you expect them to think about an Idea to write a website which let you tweet about their daily lives?
Now coming to the “Tech” aspects of it. Consider, a few lucky people who have enough knowledge about technology, who are very educated, may be even from a top tier institute of India.
As per the report from world bank: Access to electricity (% of population) , as of 2003–2007 (when these sites were build in Silicon Valley) the electricity penetration was 66.3%.
Do you expect these tech genius to use their mind on building a web product or providing people electricity or education or food ?
Moreover, add to this, a guy rising from such a poverty or who has seen such poverty, gets education from top tier Indian college and gets an offer of FAT paying job in US. Do you expect him to reject such offer and work in villages with no electricity and brainstorm over ideas to feed them? Not everyone can do that.
Consider people like Dhirubai Ambani, Ratan Tata, Narayan Murthi, Aditya Birla, Lakshmi Mittal etc. they were tech entrepreneur in India when Steve Jobs was building Laptops, they were building India.
However, Considering the changing scenario, I am pretty confident that soon India will also be producing major technology products which will have international market and can be used by Indian market as well.
