KACHARAGADLA

India is a country that is inhabited by more than 1.21 billion people, and by  2022  it is projected to replace China as the most populated nation in the world. This enormous size of its population has resulted in the difficulty of providing ample jobs to its citizens; the severity of the problem can be understood from the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) report titled  world employment social outlook , which states that the number of job seeking Indians is projected to reach 17.6 million people in 2017. Last year, the Chattisgarh Government’s Directorate of Economics and Statistics was barraged by  75,000  applicants for 30 peon jobs – a 14,000 Rupee position that involved basic tasks such as fetching tea. Amongst these queries many included requisitions from qualified engineers and management graduates. In 2011 around ten million Indians with graduate, post-graduate and technical degrees were looking for work. Unemployment rates were higher among the better qualified, a

With 4,200 tech startups, India is the third-largest tech startup hub in the world. But the steady increase in startups and a range of initiatives by the Indian government to spur growth does not mean the challenges for entrepreneurs are any less. In India, 40% of startups failed since 2014, while in the first five months of this year, over 18 businesses have shut down, according to separate surveys conducted by startup tracker Xeler8 and tech media platform Inc42. “As many as 997 of 2,281 startups in logistics, e-commerce, food tech and analytics collapsed since June 2014. The average age of these failed ventures is just over 11 months,” says Rishabh Lawania, founder of Xeler8. Last week, Indian retail mogul Kishore Biyani raised eyebrows among Indian entrepreneurs at the  Economist  India Summit in New Delhi when he said a majority of the startups lack long-term vision and were created with the aim to sell themselves off to larger companies. “Ninety percent of startups

The History of Domesticated Animals   was a course my really good friend took while attending Columbia University. Her tuition was $40,000 per year. She’s been out of college for almost 10 years, and still paying off the debt. She works at an accounting firm. Needless to say, that aforementioned course surprisingly hasn’t added any value to her current position, or any position she’s ever had in her professional career. Our education system is broken. There are countless entrepreneurs attempting to refine, disrupt and improve the broken model with online education, skill-based bootcamps and skill-based courses (including one of my projects,  Intangibly ). I recently spoke to two very impressive young entrepreneurs who are in my  Facebook group . Mind you, they’re also brother and sister, and on their second business. Brendan and Ashley Eapen are the founders of  In/Spree . After speaking to them, I told them that I was writing this column, and asked them to give their insights

According to latest google trends, the country that has the maximum interest in angel investing after US, is none other than India. This should come as no surprise as the investment made in early stage companies at US$ 7 billion is almost 60% higher than in 2014 in the wake of unprecedented growth of entrepreneurial activity across India. This steep growth has of course created its own set of problems. While the availability of funds for startups has increased, there is also some confusion among first time entrepreneurs, many of them in their early twenties, about what the goal post really is for startups. Fuelled by media hype about huge fund raises by India’s unicorns, raising funding has become the end point rather than the means to build a sustainable and successful startup. This is really a dangerous trend and can lead to increasing number of failed startups. Not to mention, lost time and opportunities for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who are currently in the midst of buil

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday kick-started the government’s ambitious Start-Up India mission, which envisages technology business incubators and research parks, at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi. Speaking at the opening session of ‘Start-up India’ movement, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday said the campaign will help change conventions while the government will only be a facilitator for start-ups. He also announced that the upcoming budget will include start-up friendly tax measures. “ PM’s own idea was that start ups need to be encouraged. Both the banking system and government will make the resources available. We are fully conscious of the adverse situation in which we are struggling to keep respectable growth rates in Indian economy,” Jaitley said at the launch event. “We ostensibly broke away from “license raj” in 1991, conceived with idea that government will decide which businesses can run. Our effort over last few years was to restrict role of states

Japanese telecom and media group SoftBank will “seriously” accelerate its investments in India, Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the start-up conference in New Delhi on Saturday. Softbank had previously said it would invest $10 billion in India over 10 years. “The time has come that the Indian economy will be big enough going forward. Mobile internet will make the domestic internet market big enough,” Son said. “I think we would seriously accelerate our investments in India going forward.” When asked about what he sees when funding any start-up he said he looks at the leadership and the commitment and determination to the company. “I look at the eyes and ideas of an entrepreneur-which field and passion, before investing,” he said. He further added that India can be bigger in momentum than China in the next 10 years. “This is the beginning of big bang start up boom in India,” Son said, adding that passion more important than making money. Son also believes that

Concepts such as incubation, early stage start-ups and others are at a nascent stage in India and mostly confined to urban areas and much can be done to strengthen their scale, scope and efficiency, said a report of the expert committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The committee, headed by noted academician Tarun Khanna, comprises eminent persons from India Inc and experts. It was constituted under the NITI Aayog. In the report, which was made public a few days ago, the panel said a survey commissioned by it showed that approximately 50 per cent of respondents feel the need to improve formal networking within their sector through associations, and to enhance their ability to work cooperatively with the government. "Approximately 60 per cent of the respondents stated that access to global markets needed to be strengthened - another area where incubators can help. Surveys also highlight that widespread investment, rather than focused investment in urban are

Talent pool and favourable system, notably a vast & growing youth talent pool, propel growth of SaaS in this metropolis, say experts While the information technology hub of Bengaluru has been compared with Silicon Valley in the US for start-ups in the sector for years, Chennai is trying to mark a place in the IT map as the hub for software as a service (SaaS). Many SaaS majors which compete directly with global leaders in their respective segments have Chennai as a home. For instance, Zoho Corporation, founded in 1996 as AdventNet Inc, launched its first cloud business app, Zoho Writer, in 2005. It competes directly with companies such as Microsoft in this market. Similarly, Freshdesk, started by Girish Mathrubootham in 2010, has been challenging the global leader in this space, Zendesk. It is one among the top three global SaaS-based customer support service entities, the company had said. It is also considered one of the few poised to soon grow beyond a billion dol