India
Talent
India’s advantage is a large technical workforce that works in English. Senior people who have shipped a product are a smaller group.
Startup EcosystemsIndiaTalent
The pool
Engineering colleges produce volume. Services firms and captive centres train people to deliver against a specification. Product companies need a thinner set of skills: choosing what to build, pricing it, and holding quality when there is no client manager. Those people are concentrated in a few cities and are bid up by the captives.
The famous public institutions, the IITs, IISc, the IIMs, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Madras, produce graduates and some research. They do not produce the bulk of hires. IIT Madras Research Park is relevant because it puts companies next to one of those campuses. It is not the national labour market.
Cities are not substitutes
A Bengaluru salary, a Hyderabad salary and a Chennai salary for the same title diverge, and the person may be unwilling to move. Pune draws people who want to stay in Maharashtra without living in Mumbai. The NCR draws managers and policy-facing roles more reliably than it draws the deepest product bench.
Senior specialists still get hired in one city and flown to another. A headcount plan that assumes every role exists locally will slip. This describes where the work is done, not where someone should live.
Other sectors
SaaS
Software sold on a contract, often to a buyer outside India. The labour is local. The revenue currency often is not.
Fintech
Most of what is called fintech in India sits on public payment rails and on someone else’s balance sheet.
Artificial intelligence
A public mission exists. The labour market is still mostly application work and services, not a guarantee of a frontier model.
Deep tech
A longer recognition window is an administrative fact. A laboratory company is still a slow company.
Consumer technology
A national install base is not a national habit of paying. Language, price, and logistics decide which India is the customer.
Manufacturing
Factories are a state subject in practice. A production-linked incentive is a contract about incremental sales, not a startup category.
Health tech
A wellness app, a hospital workflow tool, and a medical device are three regulatory objects.
Climate tech
Electrons, materials, and carbon claims are not the same business. The grid is state-regulated.
Startup finance
The cheque has a licence, a border and a vehicle. The word ‘capital’ does not settle which of the three it is.
Domestic market scale
Scale inside India is real and uneven. A single national market size is a modelling choice, not a customer.
Across GRIP
Elsewhere in the research
The same place, read from another desk.
- Real EstateHow a building is readUse, tenure and the building itself.
- EconomyIndia economyIndia is filed first as a company-formation system. The economy a founder meets is not yet a GRIP property market.
- InfrastructureIndia infrastructurePublic digital infrastructure changed how a firm starts. It did not abolish roads, power, ports, or the distance between Indian cities.
- RelocationLiving in IndiaA visa, a job, and a title are separate permissions. The week that would be lived comes before the deed.
- Global InvestmentEmerging is a classificationOfficial groupings exist to organise data. They are revised, they overlap, and they do not carry a required return or a required risk.
- Global InvestmentDemography is slow, and it is localAge structure and urban settlement shape housing need over decades. They do not time a purchase, and a national trend is not a city.
- Global InvestmentInfrastructure investment is a question of who paysA road, a power line, or a station is not a theme until the user, the payer, and the contract are named. Announced projects are not operating assets.
Continue with GRIP
Cities and sectors are different maps.
A sector note says which rule and which customer. A city note says who can be hired. Neither is a ranking.