IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw shut down outdated notions about India's tech potential, telling NDTV CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal at Davos that today's IIT graduates can build world-class careers and companies without ever leaving the country.
Asked if he could have risen to the top of IBM had he stayed in India, Krishna was blunt: "I graduated in 1985 and tried working in India. But back then, people were risk-averse, capital was scarce, and most just copied rather than invented."
"But by 2000, that changed," he added. "Look at IIT Bombay today, half the graduates are doing startups in India. The ecosystem is alive. So yes, you can now build that career here."
When told that success odds were historically higher in Silicon Valley, Krishna pushed back hard. "With respect, I completely disagree," he said. "You're looking at a self-selected group, four million top-tier Indians in the U.S., and then focusing on 40 of them. The base in India is much larger, and global Indian representation remains far below potential."
Minister Vaishnaw echoed the shift. "In 1992, I built a text-to-speech transformer, the T in GPT," he said. "Stanford researchers said it was PhD-level work, but there was no way to patent it here then."
"Those days are gone," he declared. "India now has over 200,000 startups. Every IIT student wants to start something. We're one of the top three ecosystems globally."
He cited deep tech as the next frontier. "Designing chips is one of the riskiest startup moves, we now have 24 doing it. Eighteen already have VC backing. That change is real."
