Nitin Kamath, Co-Founder and CEO, Zerodha has some valuable and sensible advice for students. He said that whenever students ask him for advice, he tells them not to leave the country. He clarifies that this is not because of an obligation towards the country, but because India is present at this moment with its opportunities and growth.
He shared his thoughts on LinkedIn with a blog post by Shruti Rajagopalan, economist at the Mercatus Center at GMU and fellow at NYU Law.
“Whenever students ask me for advice, I say, stay in India. Not just because we need to avoid brain drain or it is a liability to the country, but because India is likely to have the best opportunities in the future,” he said, adding that one in five globally under 25 1 person is from India, and 47% of Indians are under the age of 25. “This group of young Indians has some unique characteristics,” he said.
In a post titled ‘Why everyone should pay more attention to India’, Rajagopalan said it was not because of the usual reasons including scale, civilisation, history, nuclear power, G-20 but because of “changing demographics”.
He said India’s population will peak in 2065 but China’s population will peak next year. He wrote in his blog, “China will reduce and age the population over the next forty years, during the same time period, India will add as many people as China loses, more than a quarter.”
This youth group has some unique characteristics such as they grew up in a market economy, post-command-and-control socialism. They were born after the 1991 reforms, live in an India that has grown at an average of 6 per cent over three decades, have access to global goods and materials, and want to compete with the world. Second, she said they grew up with access to the Internet, becoming more connected every year. Two-thirds have access to a smartphone and some of the cheapest mobile data plans.
Third, they have had some exposure to English compared to their parents and grandparents, Rajagopalan said. Another difference, Rajagopalan pointed out, was the growing number of entrepreneurs and the vibrant startup culture.
“This generation of young Indians will be the biggest consumer and labor source in the knowledge and network goods economy,” she said.
Rajagopalan said Indian students would make up the largest international student body in most of the top universities in the English-speaking world. He urged universities to develop courses that are relevant to India, encourage exchange programs with Indian universities and facilitate work in Indian institutions. “The largest pool of talent will be STEM graduates,” she said, adding that there is a severe shortage of STEM graduates in the US and UK labor markets.
He said that the US has a particularly difficult immigration system as far as Indians are concerned. But during the tech boom, Indians basically moved to America and quickly rose to the top.
It is strange to stifle Indian talent, Rajagopalan said, considering that highly skilled Indian immigrants have an excellent track record of assimilation, considering they are often considered a model immigrant community.
Going forward, he added that Indians are already the largest audience of free content and network goods/platforms such as Meta and YouTube for content creators and distributors, and that India will be the largest market for English-language content in the future. Will happen.
Foreign VC and PE funds are on the rise in Indian startups, and investors have built pipelines and systems to evaluate Indian entrepreneurial talent and crack the Indian social and cultural code to help them find the best bets, he added. Huh.”
Giving more examples, Rajagopalan said that as Indians get richer, more bets will pay off. He said that rooting for India is in everyone’s interest. “As South Koreans got richer, the world got access to everything from better TVs and TV content to innovation in sunscreen and cosmetics,” she explained.
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