India’s towns hotbeds of entrepreneurship: OYO CEO

New Delhi: India’s small towns have now become the hotbed of entrepreneurship fuelled by the aspirations of the young population and these, along with the scaling up of small businesses will play a key role in creating many unicorns in the country through the startup ecosystem, OYO Founder and Group CEO Ritesh Agarwal said on Thursday.

Speaking at the Global Unicorn Summit – Nurturing 1,000 Unicorns by 2030 -- jointly organised by CII with DPIIT, he also stressed on the need to integrate the “very large rural mass” of India with the usage of technology and help generate income for the people. The rapid evolution of internet infrastructure, allowing cheap and quick distribution at scale, combined with access to capital provides the opportunity for a large number of small businesses in the country to scale up and become high quality sizable companies, he added. “...

The new young India that is building their businesses, is aspiring to build sizable world champions in the consumer segments that they operate,” Agarwal said. Laying out the value of small towns “in this big opportunity”, he said, “I think small town India is now more exposed to the world than ever before... I think they are no more markets. They’re actually hotbeds of new entrepreneurs getting created and they are not happy with just (being) in the tier two and tier three markets.”

He further said, “They are coming for at least the entire national market and ideally for the world.” Stressing on the need for onboarding villages in the shift that’s happening, Agarwal said, “I think, in the entire conversation here, our country has a very large rural mass and the use of technology to integrate them can be quite significant.”

Citing the example of OYO’s partnership with villagers in Gujarat and Kashmir for homestays, he said, “We have enabled villages to be able to bring their houses online and then generate a substantial amount of income on the back of it.”

Overall, he said a combination of the ecosystem and infrastructure, as well as a sense of motivation and promotion of entrepreneurship has created significant enablement for what he called “the Indian dream”. (PTI)