Where is India’s Silicon Valley? Does it really matter?

Does India have a microcosm of Silicon Valley? Is there any part of India that can qualify as the Silicon Valley’s Indian counterpart? Can Bangalore qualify? Are there Indian startups in Silicon Valley? Is India producing any Silicon-Valley type entrepreneurs at all? Is something wrong with Indian entrepreneurs? Are we not competent enough?

As a lawyer trying to create simple solutions for entrepreneurs (one of the solutions can be found here) and an entrepreneur myself, I was browsing the internet to gain a deeper understanding of some problems faced by Indian entrepreneurs. However, once I started to look at websites, forums, LinkedIn and Facebook discussions, I saw that they were replete with conversations about locating India’s Silicon Valley. This topic attracted an unusual amount of attention and comments.

Just because we’re a country of over a billion, is it necessary that we must have the best cricket team, the best boxing team, a better ‘Silicon Valley’ and the best of everything in this world?

Why are we so protective and touchy about ‘our nation’ being the best? Is that a symbol of nationalism (won’t you stand by India even if it’s not the best?) or simply a pathological issue that diverts attention from other real problems that we should instead spend time fixing (and may be a better startup cluster will automatically emerge once we do that?  

Do you think we are compared (or even comparable with anyone else) when it comes to ‘Jugaad’? 

Instead of comparing, why don’t we start (individually or collectively) and do the best wherever possible and avoid comparisons? Who are we to assess and judge what is best anyway? 

Do you really think that having a Silicon Valley in your city would have really made life easier? If Silicon Valley is where you want to be, why don’t you go there and start your own business there (in spite of the risks), or get someone from the Valley to come here?

Don’t we have a support system in India, with various E-Cells, incubators, accelerators and mentors, which is slowly mushrooming? Well, maybe it is not as effective as we would have wished it to be, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built in a day. Even in the US there are several viable alternatives to the Silicon Valley (this book discusses the startup community in Boulder, Colorado).

Identifying a Silicon Valley equivalent in India is more appropriately the job of a researcher or journalist trying to create story value around Indian startups, and may be fund managers who want to raise India-centric funds.

Undoubtedly this is a terrific topic, and Yourstory has written wonderful posts (see here for an example), which tries to identify different startup clusters within Bangalore itself (note: creating more and more information around startups is their business so they are justified in intellectualizing about this).

For startup entrepreneurs who have a million other problems to solve and bugs to fix, is this really a question to beat ourselves about? If India doesn’t have a Silicon Valley, will you still launch?

I am a co-founder at iPleaders, a startup working on making legal education accessible. We currently teaching business law to entrepreneurs, managers, working professionals and future business leaders in collaboration with NUJS, a law university in Kolkata and have organized workshops at premier engineering colleges (IIT, BITs) and for other interest groups across India (see here).