Statistics show India’s startup economy and entrepreneurial spirit growing

Statistics are showing that a pervasive spirit of entrepreneurship and mobility in India continues to drive growth in the third largest startup economy in the world after the US and the UK.

The Q1 2017 release of the Randstadt WorkMonitor report revealed a positive view on entrepreneurship: 86% of Indian countries consider India a good place to start a business of their own, a substantial 30% more than the global average.

In line with the above, Indians were the most willing to quit their jobs and start their own business. In fact, 28% of respondents in the country were considering doing so at the time of the survey.

Nasscom tech startups in India are experiencing at least 10% yearly growth. In 2016, over 1400 new startups in the field popped up and 650 earned a slice of the $4 million funding pie. Most companies are clustered around the Bangalore, NCR and Mumbai areas.  

These are great incentives for job mobility in India, which is not only on the rise but is the highest among surveyed countries. A large portion of workers, 41%, said they were looking for a new job to some degree. Such an outlook on mobility is aligned with a 72% willingness to move and emigrate for work reasons.

This is in a stark contrast with the high degree of job satisfaction among Indian workers, 82% of them expressing a high level of satisfaction with their current employer. Reasons for this incongruity might be due to ongoing cultural changes in business culture, the growing pains of developing economies as new opportunities and ambitions become a reality, furthering competition for qualified labor among startups.

The fast growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of India is a silver cloud with a dark lining: up to 90% of startups in the subcontinent eventually fail, mostly due to a lack of innovation according to a report by Oxford Economics. Indian workers are quite aware of this situation: the Randstadt report discovered that, while in love with the idea of becoming entrepreneurs, 76% of Indian workers said the risk of failure is too big – a figure 22% higher than the global average.

India’s startup ecosystem has itself a striking resemblance to a startup. Driven largely by government initiatives aiming to achieve fast growth fostering novel concepts, its entrepreneurial scene has reached a point where it is poised to mature its offering of products and services. Failing to do so would imply a slowdown in growth, compromising the country’s attractiveness for capital investment and leaving only the strongest would survive – for good or worse.