Will India give the world a technology titan like America’s Google, Facebook and Amazon or China’s Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent? With all the smart, entrepreneurial talent available — very often the same talent the rest of the world relies on to imagine and nurture its own tech companies — it is reasonable to ask what is taking us so long.

The first wave of technology development in India gained momentum in the 1990s, with companies such as the one I co-founded, Infosys, riding a tide of global outsourcing and consulting. India’s export revenues in information technology and IT-enabled services grew from less than half a billion to $40.4bn, between 1994 and 2008. A growing number of multinational enterprises were turning to technology to solve their toughest problems. High bandwidth fibre-optic connectivity, the momentum of globalisation, and the quality of talent in India, were making it easier for them to find the answers.

From the mid 2000s, the second wave of tech companies began. The rise of mobile internet, the cloud, and the ubiquity of smartphones and big data were unstoppable. What differentiated these start-ups was their acute focus on addressing the aspirations of consumers in the domestic market. Along came Flipkart, a leader in ecommerce, subsequently acquired by Walmart; Ola, a worthy ride-hailing competitor to Uber; Paytm, which pioneered payments; Swiggy for food delivery; and Oyo, a new world hotel chain.

Founded by young ambitious entrepreneurs and fuelled by the liquidity unleashed after the 2008 financial crisis, these upstarts were fired by seemingly unending optimism. Inspired by the belief in “winner-takes-all” markets, where speed to scale and dominance is of the essence, they were encouraged by funders to spend their way to growth, even if it meant huge cash burn and no profits for a long while. Having honed their business models in India, several have ventured aboard. Ola launched ride-hailing services in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Paytm is offering payments in Japan in collaboration with SoftBank and Yahoo. Oyo is scaling up its hotel business in China and the US.

All this disruption has not been without its sobering moments. The implosion of WeWork and the hurdles faced by Uber and Lyft after their public listings tempered the view that growth, no matter what the cost, is the way to go. The good news for India is that the collective attention of both the entrepreneurs and their financial backers is now being brought back to the basics of building a sustainable business. Leaders from an earlier generation of tech companies have shown the merits of focusing on sound values, such as being well-managed, making profits, generating cash and remaining debt-free.

In a world where American companies are shut out of China and Chinese companies are struggling to operate in the US, the contrast that India presents is stark. The presence of both American and Chinese digital giants in India along with dynamic entrepreneurship and access to large-scale capital, is a heady brew that has created some unicorns. India now has dozens such companies worth more than a $1bn.

The country is also unique in that it has invested in population-scale digital infrastructure for identity, payments and data sharing. Google, WhatsApp, Paytm, PhonePe (a Flipkart-Walmart company) and Amazon Pay are now competing in India’s payments sector in partnership with domestic banks.

If a truly global new Indian tech company is to emerge, it will require the coming together of the hunger and ambition of India’s young companies with the discipline of old-fashioned business building. Surely in the next decade, a couple of these promising companies will get that mix right, and achieve both global scale and profitability.



The writer is chairman and co-founder of Infosys and led India’s Aadhaar project

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