As the global entrepreneurship summit is rolled out, India has come under the Ivanka-mania. Media is paying more attention to the dinner plans, dressing style and itinerary of Ivanka Trump than the grand scale global entrepreneurship summit which India is co-hosting after seven years.
As the country is witnessing an economic slowdown amid large-scale structural changes of Goods and services tax, unleashing the entrepreneurial beast seems the only answer to the impending problem of unemployment and low growth cycle. However, our flagship program of start-up India looks a non-starter due to various structural, societal and political issues.
One of the big reason for the failure of start-up India is Indian obsession with the settlement and stability in comparison to the risky ventures of entrepreneurship. Mr. Panagaria aptly described it as brahamanical attitude of seeking for the job, certainty over charting the uncharted trajectories. The lack of overall supporting ecosystem in terms of infrastructure, policy uncertainty, and finance availability add to these difficulties. Our cost of road transportation and logistics infrastructure remains costliest in the world. This amounts to nearly 15 to 20% of the overall cost. Whereas in the other competitive economies, this cost is around 8-9% only. As a result, our indigenous products are not able to compete with cheap imports from China and elsewhere in the world. In addition, our policy uncertainty in terms of taxation or excessive business overhead for startups in terms of declaration or certifications create further trouble. Even the definition os start-up was not clear till recently. Lastly, the venture capitalist and angel investors of India are suffering from Bania mindset. For them, business is about auditing of output-input on the eve of Diwali. They prefer trading over innovation. They prefer low-risk predictable benefit over the high-risk unpredictable outcome and short-term investment over the long term. As a consequence, investors have the inclination to invest in a service-oriented firm with the clear business model than a platform based community oriented business models. One can bet if Facebook was founded in India, Mark Zuckerberg would have certainly failed to find investment in India.
However, the problem is not just limited to the ecosystem. It also lies in the innovation attitude of risk-taking class. Most of our startups are a mere replication of existing business models of the developed world. Very few startups have been able to come up with an India-specific cheap novel solution tailored to our local audience. Replication rather than innovation is the word which comes to the mind when one thinks of Indian startups. On top of this, our other flagship programs like Skill India, Make-in-India and others have failed to complement the efforts of start-up India in a credible manner. For example, Skill-India is still focussing on making papad, incense sticks and pickle instead of focussing on cloud computing, artificial intelligence and robotics. Global entrepreneurship summit is a most appropriate platform to identify some out of box solutions to shed this brahamanical and typical baniya attitude of our knowledge-driven society.
All these talks of riskless capitalist attitude suggest that India needs a scheme for startup insurance. This way we can ensure some social floor for the risk-taking individual who leaves behind their settled sphere and ventures into uncharted territory. Maybe this will give more spine to them and their family members and change the perception of society which sees entrepreneurs as strugglers with uncertain future and tend to outcast them in the social world rather than appreciating their passionate instinct. We can stretch this further. Maybe we need a class of paid entrepreneurs, to begin with. Bright MBAs and engineers who are paid by the government to solve the hitherto unresolved problems. Specifics of insurance scheme and paid entrepreneurs scheme can be worked out in detail as per ground details.
Another way to boost entrepreneurship is to "catch the early bird". For this, we need to setup mandatory college entrepreneurship cells and a mandatory applied project for students during their coursework on prevailing social problems related to their respective field. One prerequisite to this is we develop a portal which lists all the open problems of our society big or small. For example, making intelligent traffic gates and lights or creating an air purifier for the house. There could be millions of such problems. All we need is to identify and document them in a proper manner. We will always find someone who can come up with more credible and trustworthy reliable solution for them.
This portal will require some investment in research and development as well. For this, we can devise a scheme similar to corporate social responsibility. We can ask our companies to invest a part of their profit in some kind of applied research. In return, companies can enjoy the benefits of such investment. This will solve the dual problem of lack of funding and lack of research and innovation in our society.
However, a serious limitation lies in the attitude of our young kids and their parents. They take pride in the pay package culture of society and society tend to consider such kids as supreme and superior to other segments of kids. Nobody asks what kind of work are they doing or are they even doing justice to their potential. To this end, we must limit the culture of million+ salary and put an upper cap on the salary of our fresh graduates. This way the prospects of working on self-dreams would become more lucrative and wise option. But we need to ask whether this will change the mindset of consumers. Consumers are driven by the cost of the product. That is why for most of the products, Chinese brand is preferred as Chinese have mastered the technique of cheap production by scaling up the units of production. Therefore, another drastic step would be to ban the possible range of Chinese product so that we create some breathing space for our own entrepreneurs. We can also send special teams of young people to go and explore Chinese production methodology so that things we understand their sutra of cheap and large-scale innovative production.
Another stick in this conundrum is the nature of management studies in our country. By its very nature of market focus and profit orientation, the focus of management curriculum has remained concentrated in urban areas middle class and upper-class population. They seem to not consider the rural population or the rural area as a viable market. However, most of our problems start from villages and flow outward. For example, problems of urbanization are rooted in poor drought management or poor food processing industry in the villages which force people to migrate.Thus the time has come to give a rural orientation and touch to our management education.
A complete ecosystem demands that people not only see the issues but they discuss, talk and participate in the issues.For decades, our society has become too focused on discussing individuals and somehow we have stopped discussing ideas. Now the time has come for a course correction. In this regard, the role of media assumes a lot of importance as media is one which sets the agenda of discussion and acts as chief opinion-maker and articulator nowadays.
Media needs to promote the thinking which shed the fear of failure and encourage people to think differently to solve routine problems. Struggling entrepreneurs should also get enough space on media and should be recognized and rewarded accordingly. This exercise would more fruitful for media as well if we conduct all-around year competition, events and promotional program for promotion of entrepreneurship at all level be it rural, taluk, district, state or national level. We need to think, eat and drink entrepreneurship and feed the same to our population to change their mindset at faster than the normal pace.
But can we create that kind of culture when the brightest lot of our society runs away to Singapore or Dubai or the US at the very first opportunity? The answer is no. It is very difficult to overcome this selfish mindset and think of social good. It also requires immense mental strength and conviction in the idea of futuristic India. One solution to this could be to create a Singapore or Dubai type territory out of the large territory in India. I wonder why can't we convert a vast territory of Thar into Dubai Land or Lakshyadweep into Singapore. We need to take these grand initiatives and shed the bullock cart age mentality. Only if we think big, will be able to achieve big.
Entrepreneurship is the elixir to convert elephant into the tiger. We can not seek refuge inside our caves forever when dragons keep flying all over our head and cannot act like an ostrich and dig our head in the sand and ignore the imminent disaster.
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