I am not entirely sure how we got to this point, but in the span of a week, we’ve discovered that vegan ice cream and gluten-free cookies are the only roadblocks preventing India from being a leader in the deep tech startup space.
Piyush Goyal, India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, recently admonished a hall full of startup founders at Startup Mahakumbh 2025. Wearing a full face of disappointment, Goyal posed a rhetorical question that has since sent LinkedIn and Reddit abuzz: “So, what does India want to make? Ice cream or semiconductor chips?”
During his presentation, Goyal also showed a slide comparing startups in India and China. He claimed that Indian startups were preoccupied with “food delivery apps, fancy ice cream & cookies, instant grocery delivery, betting & fantasy sport apps, and reels & influencer economy,” whereas their Chinese counterparts were focused on electric vehicles, semiconductors, AI, and robotics.
There’s something deliciously mordant about a minister standing before India’s most successful non-conformists, only to scold them for conforming a little too successfully.
The minister’s admonishment triggered a cacophony of reactions and counter-reactions. Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola and Aman Gupta of boAt dutifully applauded Goyal, happy to align themselves with the official narrative of “aiming higher.”
Also read: In Meerut, ‘startup culture’ means hard-to-get loans, low demand, misplaced hope
Minister gets a reality check
Not everyone was eager to swallow though. Aadit Palicha, the CEO of Zepto, wrote on X that his company had created over 1.5 lakh jobs and contributed over Rs 1,000 crore in taxes each year, labelling it a “miracle in Indian innovation”. (For his troubles, Palicha received a lecture all his own from BJP leader Praveen Khandelwal, who said “claiming to create jobs and pay taxes while burning foreign capital to dismantle India’s small neighbourhood kirana stores is not innovation.”) Former BharatPe managing director, Ashneer Grover, went a step further to take a swipe at the government: “It’s great to aspire for what they [China] have done — maybe time for politicians to aspire for 10%+ economic growth rate for 20 years flat before chiding today’s job creators.”
These exchanges, flying thick and fast, perfectly mirrored our national inability to have an honest conversation. Meanwhile, the minister’s unkind remarks opened the floodgates for several founders to unveil the reality of “ease of doing business” in India. Murtaza Amin, who runs an IT services company, BizProspex, in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, wrote about relentless bureaucratic harassment in a widely read X thread. Amin stated that he and his coworkers were “treated like 3rd grade citizens by babus” who demanded bribes for everything. “Aren’t we building digital India? Or is that a jumla for commoners like us?” he asked.
Another founder in a semiconductor startup directly addressed Goyal in an open letter on Reddit: “Your department sat on my application for over 2 years and returned it…asking for “Additional documents” with a note that after submitting the documents my application will again go to the back of the queue (i.e. another 2 years)! Within a few hours of your rejection I got a call from a “facilitator” who promised me quick and guaranteed results if I use their service for “preparing my documents”!”
The most frustrating aspect of this debate, though, is that Goyal—despite his withering tone—is absolutely right. Yes, India’s deep tech landscape is sparse compared to China’s robust ecosystem of over 6,000 companies that have collectively raised nearly $100 billion. Yes, we have disproportionately focused on consumer-facing apps that serve the rich thanks to a vast pool of exploitable labour with no viable choice. The data bears this out unambiguously: only about 5 per cent of total funding in our startup ecosystem goes to deep tech, compared to 35 per cent in China. And yes, “77 per cent of venture capitalists report that many Indian startups lack pioneering innovation based on new technologies or unique business models.”
But wagging fingers at startup founders fails to acknowledge the complex web of structural barriers that systematically choke innovation in infancy. Goyal’s comparison with China conveniently omits that the Chinese government invested in a 20-year vision to develop an ecosystem where deep tech could flourish. India’s research and development expenditure, meanwhile, hovers at a paltry 0.6-0.7 per cent of GDP.
Also read: Can’t rely on foreign investors. India must become aatmanirbhar in startup financing
Killing innovation at every step
Systematic innovation doesn’t emerge overnight from ministerial directives. It grows through years of intentional cultivation. And India’s social and cultural landscape is fundamentally antithetical to the idea of innovation.
The first frontier is the family, which discourages any risk-taking, followed closely by India’s education system, designed to suffocate any creative impulse. From the earliest years, schools reward memorisation over meaning. In these cognitive prisons, divergent thinking is actively punished. Students learn quickly that questioning the teacher or exploring tangential ideas leads to lower marks. All this while, the muscle of creative thinking atrophies.
Vidhi Jain, co-founder of Shikshantar, a centre aimed at “unschooling”, recalls an art workshop with young children who reproduced the same mountain-sun-river picture plastered across the walls of every Indian institution. When children are taught that their worth is measured by their ability to reproduce textbook knowledge and even fun is standardised, why are we surprised when they grow into adults who struggle to colour outside the lines?
By the time these students reach adulthood, they’ve internalised a profound risk aversion. We have engineering graduates with no sense of history and business students who can only parrot case studies. These are not failures of individual imagination but predictable outcomes of our educational methodology. This is how we end up with a “demographic dividend” that is hardly employable, and a Global Innovation Index rank of 39.
The very skills that are essential for deep tech innovation — a certain comfort with uncertainty, multidisciplinary thinking, and a massive tolerance for failure — are routinely extinguished. Ironically, India’s enormous engineering talent has been poised to take on the challenges posed by “the coming wave”. After all, our brilliant minds power innovation in other countries that makes its way back here, while the rest of us are trained to execute rather than envision.
Nothing illustrates this theatre of innovation than the recent controversy surrounding “Ping Browser”, which won a Rs 75 lakh prize at the Indian Web Browser Development Challenge. This government-backed initiative was meant to foster India’s technological creativity. Instead, it rewarded what was essentially a rebranded version of the open-source Brave Browser with only cosmetic alterations. The most atmanirbhar thing about this “Made in India” browser was apparently the audacity to claim it as original work.
We cannot have an anti-innovation ecosystem and also demand the fruits of innovation. We cannot punish creativity, initiative, and risk-taking, and then throw up our hands when the next semiconductor revolution doesn’t emerge from within our borders.
Do bureaucrats dream of electric startups? Maybe, but only if those startups conform to a slow-moving ecosystem, sign the correct forms in triplicate, and never ever question. In a country where even the PM cannot go off script, we’ll have to be content with rebranded browsers. And maybe vegan ice cream isn’t so bad—at least it’s honest about what it is.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
