The New Economic Scrabble

Context: Three acts of private (Jio), non-profit (UPI), policy intervention (GST) converged to accelerate our start-up ecosystem.

Background

• India’s booming start up ecosystem: A unicorn was born every 10 days this year.
• Estimates suggest India’s startup ecosystem valuation will explode from $315 billion today to $1 trillion by 2025.

Shifts in India’s ‘Start-up & Economic Fabric’ - The effect of triad

• Private sector – Jio: The market disruption in last 5 years, Jio is responsible for 15 times more data consumption and triggered the massive shift in market dynamics.
• Cost competitiveness: A bold and risky $35 billion bet by private company, has given public the access to internet at just 3% of cost of that of US.
• Non-profit segment – UPI: A remarkable run by the National Payment Corporation of India, a non-profit venture that designed real-time, low-cost open architecture payment plumbing is a public good that now allows public to transfer money without hindrance.
• Rampant digitalization: Presently, 4 billion UPI transactions a month, it is expected to rise to 1 billion transactions a day making it a pillar for presence-less, cashless and paperless but Aadhar seeded India-stack framework.
• Policy intervention - GST: GST attacked supply chain corruptions and transmission bottlenecks while incentivizing law abiding supply and distribution chains.
• Other supportive policies: Recent privatization of Air-India is another step of correcting India’s misclassification of private consonants as government vowels.

Conclusion: Our mass prosperity after independence was sabotaged by imbalance between private, non-profit and government players because economic magic needs an engine firing from all three cylinders. The triad has reinforced the three cylinders and thus India’s better scrabble days begin.