Scindia hails India’s digital and entrepreneurial revolution at Nation Builders Summit, IMC 2025
The sunday mail
New Delhi .Union Minister for Communications and Development of North Eastern Region, Jyotiraditya Scindia, addressed the Nation Builders Summit at India Mobile Congress 2025, outlining how India has undergone a historic transformation over the past decade from a services-led economy to a global powerhouse for digital innovation, advanced manufacturing, and entrepreneurship.
The Minister noted that a nation once largely defined as a “services country” has today vertically integrated backwards into high-value manufacturing from digital services to products, and all the way to semiconductor chips. He credited the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose push for Digital India, Startup India and the Semiconductor Mission over the last 11 years laid the foundation for this leap.
“India, which could not even imagine manufacturing chips a decade ago, is today building semiconductor fabs from Gujarat to Assam,” he said, adding that this revolution mirrors the impact of roadways and railways during the Industrial Revolution, connecting people, production, and opportunity at scale.
Scindia underscored India’s rise as the third-largest digital nation in the world, with 1.2 billion mobile subscribers, 974 million Internet users, and 944 million broadband subscribers. With 46% of the world’s digital transactions happening through UPI amounting to $3 trillion annually, India has built the largest digital public infrastructure in the world, empowering millions to participate in the digital economy.
He highlighted how the startup ecosystem has exploded from just a handful of enterprises 15 years ago to over 180,000 startups and more than 100 unicorns today. This wave of innovation, he noted, is no longer limited to metros: “Today, a majority of companies listed on the stock exchange are based out of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Entrepreneurial energy is rising from every small town and district.”
The Minister also spotlighted a powerful shift towards gender equity in entrepreneurship, with over 73,000 women-led startups emerging as strong drivers of growth. “If India must move from Amrit Kaal to Shatabdi Kaal, every citizen especially women must be equal participants in building the New India of 2047,” he said.
Drawing on his experiences at Stanford, Scindia invoked the lessons of Andy Grove “the only constant is change” and “only the paranoid survive” emphasizing that these principles define the DNA of Indian entrepreneurship today. He praised the government–industry partnership model that has replaced regulation with facilitation: “Government provides the runway, and entrepreneurs provide the flight.”
Calling this a defining decade for India, he said, “This is your time. India will not just be vocal for local but local for global designing in India, solving in India and scaling for the world.”
