00:00Sir, first of all, good morning, sir. Namaste.
00:13Good morning.
00:14Pleasure meeting you.
00:15So what's your journey from Ravalpindi to Silicon Valley via Kanpur?
00:20Via Kanpur and via IIT Bombay.
00:23The IIT Bombay was the platform that prepared me to be able to draw to Emerita and succeed.
00:33How can India promote entrepreneurship and innovation to economic growth for India?
00:41Well, it's already doing it, right?
00:43So India is becoming more and more entrepreneurial.
00:46When I first came to talk about entrepreneurship in 1998, India was still not very clear.
00:54But now we have a startup India program.
00:57We have 200,000 entrepreneurs.
01:00We have over 100 Unitrons.
01:02So it's happening.
01:03It needs to happen at a much larger state.
01:06India needs to plan to have 10 million entrepreneurs by 2047, maybe 10 lakh or 1 million entrepreneurs by 2030.
01:18So it needs to have a policy framework to enable entrepreneurship, the investments in startups.
01:26It's still very, very hard to do a startup and invest in a startup in India.
01:31Yeah, maybe no chapter didn't touch this if you do investment in startups.
01:36And if we have 10 million entrepreneurs, yeah, innovation will be taken care of.
01:42Jobs will be taken care of.
01:44The entrepreneurs are very innovative people.
01:46They think of new way of doing it.
01:48But also India needs to start investing more in research.
01:52My sense is that we are finally adopting technology.
01:57The whole teletom sector, the whole Adhaar and payment system is all technology driven.
02:05So what are the lessons you have learned from your success and failure?
02:10And what do you want to say to young entrepreneurs who are budding, sir?
02:13So, every success has failure built into it.
02:19Yeah, you fail, yeah, when you learn to ride a bicicletal, you fall a few times before you are able to ride a bicicletal.
02:26Same is true with anything, you know, becoming entrepreneurs, you know, you stumble along the way.
02:32But that's in the nature of the beast, you know, that shouldn't disturb you.
02:36Yeah, the, yeah, eventually you learn to ride the bicicletal, you know, learn to become a successful entrepreneur.
02:42Many youngsters wanted to travel to America.
02:45So, what's your take on that?
02:48Okay, so two things.
02:51The India lives in villages.
02:55India lives in third, fourth tier cities.
02:58And they are sort of stuck in the mud.
03:00Metros like Hyderabad have done well.
03:02You know, we have unitrons, you know, in places like that.
03:05But we need to have micro entrepreneurs, you know, small entrepreneurs who go back to the villages,
03:11who go back to their third tier, fourth tier city and solve the local problems using technology.
03:17So, back in the 60s, America felt that they were falling behind Soviet Union, you know, in space race.
03:25And so they wanted engineers to come to America and said they opened the doors.
03:30And people like us, who were coming out of IITs, had no jobs available in India.
03:35And so we said, oh, yeah, yeah.
03:38U.S. is going to restore America.
03:41So we went to America and we made the most of it.
03:45But now America feels that they don't need, you know, to have people.
03:49They want to, you know, save jobs for their own people.
03:52And so they're shutting the door down.
03:54But we don't have any birth rights to go to America.
03:58You know, we won't let Bangladeshis turn to India to cater our jobs.
04:03So Americans are shutting down.
04:05But at the same time, the opportunity is here.
04:08You know, India has opened up.
04:11India is growing very nicely.
04:13Yeah.
04:14Yeah.
04:15So you don't have to go to America, you know, to do a job, to start up a company.
04:18So opportunities are here rather than in America.
04:21You're not welcome.
04:22It's hard.
04:23You know, right over there now.
04:25So, yeah.
04:26Yeah.
04:27This might be the time when the Indian elite stays back and makes India happen.
04:33It's a great morning.
04:34Thanks for joining us, sir.
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