New Delhi
India’s small towns have now become the hotbed of entrepreneurship fuelled by the aspirations of the young population and these, along with the scaling up of small businesses will play a key role in creating many unicorns in the country through the startup ecosystem, OYO Founder and Group CEO Ritesh Agarwal said on Thursday.
Speaking at the Global Unicorn Summit, Nurturing 1,000 Unicorns by 2030 — jointly organised by CII with DPIIT, he also stressed on the need to integrate the “very large rural mass” of India with the usage of technology and help generate income for the people living there.
The rapid evolution of internet infrastructure, allowing cheap and quick distribution at scale, combined with access to capital provides the opportunity for a large number of small businesses in the country to scale up and become high quality sizable companies, he added.
“The new young India that is building their businesses, is aspiring to build sizable world champions in the consumer segments that they operate,” Agarwal said.
Laying out the value of small towns “in this big opportunity”, he said, “I think small town India is now more exposed to the world than ever before…I think they are no more markets. They’re actually hotbeds of new entrepreneurs getting created and they are not happy with just (being) in the tier two and tier three markets.” He further said, “They are coming for at least the entire national market and ideally for the world. So, there’s a very structural shift that’s happening in small town India.”
