Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant is hopeful that IPOs will drive India’s startup revolution

When addressing a virtual event, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant highlighted India’s economic
potentials by mentioning how among 17 economies, India has emerged as the second-fastest in
digitisation. Digitisation has provided an impetus to the startup ecosystem in India and IPOs will
drive the country's startup revolution, he further added.
His comments took us back to a few days, when Zomato made a stellar IPO debut and its shares
surged nearly 66 percent against the issue price of Rs 76. In a large and diverse country like
India, the ability to rapidly execute and scale up programmes to reach 1.3 billion citizens, in
vernacular languages, is important, Kant noted. He further hinted at the importance of
technology and mentioned that startups should leverage technology for social good. According
to him, the intersection of ecommerce and the internet has created opportunities for business.
He also harped on the inputs from AI and mentioned that nowhere in the world would startups
get the size and scale of data as they do in India. He added that data sets provide the
opportunity to use AI and ML across a range of areas like health, agriculture and education.