The role and needs of startups in India were discussed by Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Jayant Sinha, at TiEcon Delhi 2017. Sinha was one of the inaugural speakers at the two-day conference focused on entrepreneurship and startups. In his speech, Sinha said the kinds of startups needed by the country could be seen in Indian e-commerce company, Flipkart.

“Flipkart solved the problem of shopping online by introducing cash-on-delivery and reverse logistic, an idea even its arch rival Amazon adopted and introduced it as one of the mode of payments,” Sinha said. Two important aspects Sinha mentioned startups should consider would be creating products which are solutions for daily problems experienced by consumers and the importance of affordability when pricing products. Sinha recommended the sectors of fintech, electric two-wheelers and drones for collaborations between startups and investors.

“There is a need to create India’s very own vision fund with a corpus of as much as $100 billion,” Rajan Anandan, Google’s VP of Southeast Asia and India said in his speech at TiEcon Delhi. “Of the corpus about $10-$15 million each, should be allocated to three-five sectors including healthcare, education, agriculture, among others, so that start-ups working in these sectors are able to receive investments from time to time.”

According to Anandan, agricultural startups should be invested in for at least 30 years at a time
to allow enough time for real growth to occur. “India in terms of volume is the largest producer of two-wheelers but those run on petrol,” Sinha said. “There is a need to switch to electronic two-wheelers and engineers can play a vital role in that. Drones are another product that can solve a lot of problems for many sectors right from e-commerce, agriculture, security, etc.”

(Picture courtesy: Youtube)