Entrepreneurship: India's Pathway to SuccessThe start-up movement in our country has seen many fits and starts. In the early days when employment, ideally in "safe Government jobs" was the best option for any educated young person in society, failed entrepreneurs could be frowned upon or even have their matrimonial prospects curtailed. Cut to the present day when every young person fancies himself as the next Zuckerberg or Bansal and we can see that the country has traversed the full course.

India is standing at the cusp of unprecedented opportunity. A sustained nominal GDP growth in double digits annually over the next eight years and massive investments in physical, digital and social infrastructure can make India the best performing economy in the world in this decade. This will happen through scaling of global and domestic firms in manufacturing and services and substantial productivity improvement in agriculture, and most important, the ongoing support to start-ups to generate a new wave of entrepreneurial success.

The start-up movement in our country has seen many fits and starts. In the early days when employment, ideally in "safe Government jobs" was the best option for any educated young person in society, failed entrepreneurs could be frowned upon or even have their matrimonial prospects curtailed. Cut to the present day when every young person fancies himself as the next Zuckerberg or Bansal and we can see that the country has traversed the full course. Definitive milestones along the way have been the emergence of the venture capital and angel funding industry, the success of executives turned entrepreneurs like Narayana Murthy and Raman Roy and more recently the runaway valuations enjoyed by unicorn companies like Flipkart, Ola and PayTM. The emergence of incubators all over the country, both within academic institutions and through entrepreneurial initiatives and the Government support and visible leadership clarion cries like the Prime Minister's "Start-Up India Stand-Up India" initiative have all helped to foster the thought in young minds and even in seasoned executives that it is better to build an exciting new company that creates jobs than to hold on to a predictable employment or seek a job in an organisation created by someone else.

However, recent trends have shown that the start-up opportunity is not all that it was imagined to be and indeed, one could twist an old cliché and say "where angels fear to tread, fools rush in". The dramatic drop in valuations and the dreaded "down rounds" for fresh capital for firms who were the original darlings of investors in the seemingly limitless Business to Consumer (B2C) space and the realisation that it is real companies with fast growing revenues and a clear path to profitability that deserve high valuations and ongoing investments have come as a reality check to the frothy ideas of the past and we can expect the next wave of entrepreneurship to genuinely add value to the country and to all investors. Successful entrepreneurs will emerge as a consequence of deep investments in PLI manufacturing, Health Tech, Fintech and Deep Tech and it will be platforms like UPI in wide ranging areas, from Education and Skills to SMEs to the Circular Economy that will build the next wave of success in India and abroad for entrepreneurs. To enable this to happen at scale, it is not just a great idea and a good business model with an experienced team that are needed, but also a robust eco-system. This eco-system would generate awareness, accelerate good ideas, enable corporate innovation centres to embrace start-ups and ensure mentoring and financing at scale to grow the entrepreneurial landscape.

Success must be measured not just by the number of start-ups that start the journey but also the number that move from proof of concept to real solutions and early stage to venture capital funding, private equity and IPOs. Entrepreneurship can truly provide pathways to success for a million plus aspirants and this will be necessary for India to succeed well into 2047 and beyond.