'Signs of a country solving own problems first': Netizens unpack India’s innovation hurdles in response to Goyal's remarks

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal’s recent remarks at Startup Mahakumbh — questioning why Indian entrepreneurs are mostly building apps — have ignited a wider debate on India’s innovation landscape. While some founders endorsed the minister’s call for deeper tech ambitions, netizens on platforms like Reddit offered a more grounded take on the structural challenges innovators face.

“India was once called a nation of call centers and it sounded like an insult,” a Reddit post read. “But quietly, it trained millions of young Indians to speak fluent English and dream beyond their hometowns. That was phase one.”

The post traced India's journey through the IT boom — “phase two” — and its current “phase three”, where startups are solving uniquely Indian problems. “It looks chaotic from the outside,” the post noted, “but these are signs of a country solving its own problems first, before solving the world's.”

Goyal made a pointed remark during his recent address at Startup Mahakumbh. Speaking to a packed audience of founders, investors, and policymakers,                                 .

While the sentiment was appreciated, it also sparked critical responses about the structural limitations that continue to stifle innovation. 

“It’s not that people don’t want to innovate,” one commenter replied to the Reddit post. “But innovation requires iteration, failure, and adaptation. And now this guy expects young entrepreneurs to bear all that risk alone — or just ‘take a government loan’ as if that’s some magic solution?”

Another response, more personal in tone, highlighted the red tape that frustrates startup founders in India. “I raised capital in March 2023. Our company wasn’t yet registered because the MCA portal was down,” the commenter wrote. “There was a point where our investors threatened to cancel the deal if we couldn’t register in a week.”

Things got worse. “Our registration was cancelled and we were hit with a notice that we were ‘disrespecting the emblem’. I’ll keep the name private, but it was something like XYZ AI Pvt Ltd. How the f*** did that disrespect the emblem?”

The comment ended with frustration: “We had to register our name with some shit name.”

The original post concluded with a vision: “Sure, we should go more deep tech and we will. But first we need more patient capital, more research-led universities & more talent density. A deep tech ecosystem can't be built in a hackathon. It will be built by a million engineers solving a billion daily problems.”