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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Start-up fever grips young tech-savvy Indians

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Alexandre Marchand


In the basement of a Bangalore building, hundreds of young Indians sit in neat rows of desks typing furiously, all dreaming of becoming the new Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg.


A quarter of a century after liberalisation kickstarted India’s economic transformation, a new generation of young people are capitalising on their parents’ hard-won financial security to try their luck in the risky business of tech start-ups.


“It’s really picking up,” said Aneesh Durg, a young Indian-origin student from Chicago who came to the southern tech hub of Bangalore to help develop a device that helps blind people read written text.


More and more young people in the country of 1.25 billion people are opting to go it alone, in stark contrast to previous generations that valued the stability of employment above all else.


India now has some 4,750 tech start-ups — the highest number in the world after the United States and Britain — which it is fast catching up. Success stories include Flipkart, Amazon’s rival in India, and online supermarket Big Basket.


From robots and mobile apps to smart kitchens and a cocktail-making machine the cavernous Bangalore office, which houses one of India’s biggest start-up incubators, is a veritable ideas factory.


Vikram Rastogi is a robotics expert who set up a small incubator named Hacklab after visiting the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014.


“I saw the kind of hardware work they were doing. We could also do the same kind of hardware work in India, it’s just that people do not pursue it much further,” he explains.


The engineering graduate is currently working on ways to enable drones to operate as part of a fleet in order to harness more information, an application that could be used to gather data over large areas such as the vast farms of Australia or Brazil.


But the path is not always smooth.


“When I started this, we had a lot of people who came to us with start-up ideas,” Rastogi says, but he admits some give up over time often due to family pressure to get a salaried job.


Sylvia Veeraraghavan, one of the millions who have migrated to Bangalore for work since the 1990s, is watching this new generation of self-starters with interest.


Veeraraghavan, who works for a charity after a 25-year career in IT, believes the rising prosperity of India’s middle class has given young people the freedom to experiment. “They are not constricted, or restricted, having to take up a job, or finding their next meal,” she said. “They can be innovative, they can be imaginative.” —AFP


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