Funding techies not the way, says KT Rama Rao

Hyderabad: Information technology minister K.T. Rama Rao on Thursday said that start-ups should think beyond problem-solving to scale up, and inculcate the art of articulating their products better. 

Mr Rao interacted with heads of businesses and industry during the World Economic Forum’s Indian Economic Summit.

The minister cited the example of Silicon Valley and the Internet, and underlined the government’s role in fostering them in the initial stages.

“The Telangana state government has started T-Hub, India’s largest technology incubator, which is providing aspiring entrepreneurs access to mentorship, investors, markets and governments. The state government has given start-ups an opportunity to dabble with pain points that the common man confronts and to come up with solutions,” he said.

He said the popular RTA m-Wallet was one of the outcomes. “We are expanding T-Hub to make it the world’s largest technology incubator. Ideas generally get nipped in the bud, but at T-Hub, innovators walk in with an idea and walk out with a product,” Mr Rama Rao said.

Asked about the Centre’s Startup India initiative, Mr Rao said it was not enough to pump in money. “Govern-ments cannot spur entrepreneurship; it has to come from the private sector. Governments have to create infrastructure, platforms and regulations that don’t come in the way of doing business,” he said.

He said there was a good number of inves-tors worldwide looking for investing in great ideas. “There are not enough ideas. The way forward for an initiative like Start-up India will be to encourage kids to innovate from a young age. Catch them young. Give them the pain points of a common man and ask them to come up with solutions. Just allocation of money will not help. Governance is not about being seen or heard, it's about being felt. We need to aid innovation and don't meddle with it,” he said.

The minister interacted with industry and business leaders including Godrej group chairman Adi Godrej, Infosys executive vice-chairman Kris Gopalakri-shnan, ReNew Power chairman and CEO Sumant Sinha, USIBC senior directors Jay Gullish and Abhishek Kishore, AAVADA chai-rman Vineet Mittal, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud president K. Dil-ipkumar, LuLu Interna-tional chairman Yusuff Ali M.A., Welspun India CEO Dipali Goenka and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries India MD Kazunori Konishi.