Debjani Ghosh – cnbctv 18

January 7, 2021January 7, 2021

India on track to have a 50-plus strong unicorn club in 2021: Report

STARTUP DIGEST: Top startup stories of the day

The number of new startups added in 2020 fell considerably compared to the previous year. While the number of dormant startups grew as the pandemic ravaged through the economy, said a new report on the Indian tech startup ecosystem for 2020 by NASSCOM and Zinnov.

Over 1,600 startups were added to the tech ecosystem in 2020 compared to over 2,500 the year before. There was also a 3 percent rise in the number of dormant startups.

The total funding in tech startups of less than five years old, nearly halved in 2020 to USD 3.5 billion from USD 6.5 billion in 2019.

However, the second half of the year did show some green shoots as investor sentiment picked up. Funding touched USD 2.3 billion in the second half, nearly the same level seen in the first half of 2019.

The number of startups raising first round of funding was also up from 29 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2020.

The unicorn club expanded despite the pandemic, and India is on track to have over 50 strong unicorns in 2021.

Fintech, edutech and agritech saw a boost during the COVID-19 lockdown whereas mobility, travel and hospitality were worst hit.

So what are startups expecting from the government in budget 2021? To discuss this Shereen Bhan spoke to Debjani Ghosh, president of Nasscom; Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov and Yashish Dahiya, co-founder & group CEO of Policybazaar.com.

Watch video for more.

November 18, 2020November 18, 2020

Experts discuss the challenges India could face as it moves towards a contact-less economy

Along with the online paperless ticket booking, patrons will also be encouraged to utilise the digital platforms for placing F&B orders and making payments to reduce direct physical contact (Image Source: MAI)

The phrase ‘contact-less’ has assumed many avatars in a post-COVID world and the pandemic has effectively accelerated India’s march towards a contact-less economy.

This emergent economy is being driven by supply-side factors like the rise and adoption of digital technologies, 5G, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics. On the demand-side, the need for convenience, along with a heightened awareness for health and safety among consumers are the biggest pull factors.

As India reaches an inflection point where technology redefines operating models, businesses are having to digitise at a pace never seen before. Concepts like tele-medicine, delivery by drone, on-the-go education are now a reality. Many sectors have seen companies traverse the phygital world to service the customer and others like online food delivery, retail, ecommerce and payments are reporting a surge in both digital adoption and usage.

So, as we settle into this contact-less ecosystem, what kind of technological innovations can we expect? What kind of policy support or shift will be needed to enable India’s transformation into a contact-less universe?

To take the discussion forward, CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan spoke to Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal; Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director of Apollo Hospitals; and Debjani Ghosh, President of Nasscom.

Coronavirus impact: Nasscom says ensuring customers that the new model will work important

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

Listen to the Article (6 Minutes)

Summary

The most important thing for us right now is to ensure that once we are done with this, we work with clients, we reach out to our customers, we talk to our customers and we ensure they understand that we are committed to making this new model work, Debjani Ghosh, the president of industry body NASSCOM.

One thousand and seventy one – that’s the total number of confirmed cases in India as of this morning with 942 active cases, according to the ministry of health. 99 patients have been discharged while the death toll stands at 29.

Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Delhi have seen the biggest spike in the number of cases in the last 24 hours. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) continues to maintain that COVID-19 has not entered the community transmission phase yet.

With the nation-wide lockdown to contain the spread of the virus entering the sixth day, cabinet secretary Rajiv Gauba has dismissed reports that the government may be looking at extending the 21-day lockdown, which ends on April 14.

Meanwhile, the exodus of migrant workers continues to be a challenge. The Centre has already ordered all states and union territories to ensure migrant workers are not allowed to cross state borders and to quarantine migrant workers who have reached their borders for a mandatory 2 weeks. According to government estimates, around 3 lakh migrant workers have breached the lockdown and hit the roads.

Today, A CJI-led Supreme Court (SC) bench refused to pass any orders on a PIL seeking relief for these migrant workers. It has given the government one day to file a status report on the measures that it has taken in this regard. The court observed that this migration of labourers, which is a result of panic and fear, has become a bigger problem than the coronavirus itself.

The Indian IT industry is also struggling to cope with the COVID-19 outbreak. This, despite a home ministry advisory asking states to permit the IT and ITeS industry to carry out functions linked to providing essential services like banking. Besides the movement of people, the industry is also grappling with costs, and top industry sources tell us that cost rationalisation could be a reality for many.

Sharing her outlook on the road ahead for IT and ITes industry, Debjani Ghosh, the president of industry body NASSCOM said, “We are taking it as one-day at a time and as an industry, our priority is the safety of employees. How do we ensure that we get pretty much as close to 90-95 percent of our employees safely to their homes so they can work from home and keep only what is required to run critical services like banking, hospitals etc.”

“The most important thing for us right now is to ensure that once we are done with this, we work with clients, we reach out to our customers, we talk to our customers and we ensure they understand that we are committed to making this new model work,” she said.

“For our kind of work, disruption in power supply is huge. So, we do expect a lot of challenges and we are doing our best to talk to every state to figure out how we can safeguard ourselves against these challenges and the biggest task is to ensure that our clients don’t suffer, they don’t feel the impact of this transition that we are going through and we are able to continue to support them,” she added.

“It gets better day by day. Initially when the lockdown was announced, employee movement was completely stopped in most states. We had to work overnight with every single state government and not just state government, district collectors, police commissioners to make them understand what is required to ensure that these essential services continue but companies have been just going out to ensure that there is no disruption and so far we have not heard of a big fiasco as yet and I hope we don’t,” said Ghosh.

Talking about the road ahead, she further mentioned, “We are all expecting the global gross domestic product (GDP) to get hit. The pundits are coming out with all sorts of ranges from 5 percent to 10 percent etc. So we know that the global GDP is definitely going to get hit and I don’t want to put a number to it right now because it is still too early and we are still trying to figure out what the real impact will be on the global GDP on one hand and then on our sector.”

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Oil Fluctuates as Traders Assess China’s Vow, Unrest in Libya

Shanghai residents turn to NFTs to record COVID lockdown, combat censorship

today's market

Global Top Gainers Top Loosers nifty sensex

index	Price	Change
nifty 50	₹16,986.00	-72.15
sensex	₹1,882.60	+28.30
nifty IT	₹2,206.80	+30.85
nifty bank	₹1,318.95	-14.95

index	Price	Change
nifty 50	₹16,986.00	-7.15
sensex	₹1,882.60	+8.30
nifty IT	₹2,206.80	+3.85
nifty bank	₹1,318.95	-1.95

index	Price	Change
nifty 50	₹16,986.00	-72.15
sensex	₹1,882.60	+28.30
nifty IT	₹2,206.80	+30.85
nifty bank	₹1,318.95	-14.95

index	Price	Change
nifty 50	₹16,986.00	-7.15
sensex	₹1,882.60	+8.30
nifty IT	₹2,206.80	+3.85
nifty bank	₹1,318.95	-1.95

index	Price	Change
nifty 50	₹16,986.00	-7.15
sensex	₹1,882.60	+8.30
nifty IT	₹2,206.80	+3.85
nifty bank	₹1,318.95	-1.95

Currency

Company	Price	Chng	%Chng
Dollar-Rupee	73.3500	0.0000	0.00
Euro-Rupee	89.0980	0.0100	0.01
Pound-Rupee	103.6360	-0.0750	-0.07
Rupee-100 Yen	0.6734	-0.0003	-0.05

Quiz

Are you a Crypto Head? It’s time to prove it!

10 Questions · 5 Minutes

Start Quiz Now

Win WRX (WazirX token) worth Rs. 1500.

Question 1 of 5

What coins do you think will be valuable over next 3 years?

BTC

SOL

ETH

June 14, 2019

Want to see a commitment in union budget to develop an end-to-end data strategy, says Nasscom’s Debjani Ghosh

Parliament winter session, Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Law Minister, Scheduled Caste Reservation, Scheduled Tribe Reservation, Anglo Indians

Putting her wish list for the upcoming union budget, Debjani Ghosh, president of Nasscom, on Friday said that she wants to see a commitment by the union finance minister on developing an end-to-end data strategy.

“Data is going to fuel the digital economy, in fact, we are moving towards a data-driven economy. So, we need to have a strategy that focuses everything from creation to value creation with protection, of course, being the foundation. However, we cannot make it just about protecting, we have to build the concept of trust, partnerships and more importantly innovation and value creation,” Ghosh said.

“This is a unique time for India as the world is trying to figure out how it transforms itself for the use of new technologies. India and Indian-based companies are providing a lot of solutions. We have to ensure that we are creating a fiscal climate which will allow these companies to thrive and to grow. We did have the SEZ clause etc. for the IT services sector and we need to ensure that with the changing competitive dynamics, we relook at these initiatives and we plan it for the next 10-15 years. Also, it is going to be critical for IT services and business process management (BPM),” she said.

“For start-ups and SMEs, we need to build a way that government will start buying from them. It is critical as a lot of startups are forced to leave India because of the inability to scale and we have to solve that problem,” she added.

February 21, 2019February 21, 2019

CEO survey is a better way to understand IT outlook, says Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh

The apex software industry lobby Nasscom on Wednesday ended the practice of forecasting annual growth and said it was cautiously optimistic about 2019, citing rising global economic uncertainties arising out of trade wars and protectionism.

The decision was announced during Nasscom’s Technology and Leadership Forum 2019.

Nasscom has been having a practice of coming out with an estimate on industry’s revenue growth every February for the next fiscal year. Last year, it did not come out with a guidance in February, but pushed it to May because of difficult market conditions.

Its president Debjani Ghosh said the entire industry landscape is transforming at a faster pace with the advent of digital, making it “impossible to predict the future”.

When asked if the body will come out with a number mid-way through the year like last fiscal, Ghosh denied such a possibility, saying there is a need to look at the industry with a “new lens” and gave a broad colour of what to expect. “At best, we are cautiously optimistic about the year….it is a year of challenges and transformation,” she said, pointing out the difficulties that await the sector.

“So, the CEO survey is a much better way of understanding the outlook and end of the year we will come back and look at how the industry has performed,” Ghosh said.

Keshav Murugesh, group CEO, WNS, said, “I actually think that CEOs on the client side are much more focused on the disruption out there in the market place. Who is their new competition, are they investing enough in technology, are they being relevant to the appropriate set of customers, things like that as opposed to focusing on what will happen which is out of their control. In fact, that is actually creating lots of new opportunities for all of us.”

Rostow Ravanan, MD and CEO, Mindtree, said, “Our clients are telling us that they are preparing for a range of scenarios. Technology is empowering businesses to do so many things that they never thought was possible in the past. Every single speaker from the enterprise world is telling you that technology is part of the core business strategy for all the enterprises right now.

February 20, 2019February 21, 2019

Nasscom ends annual growth forecast, says the way it measures success is changing

“The way success was measured is now changing. In the past industry had used a certain way to project guidance but with the transformation that has taken place, it is not apt anymore and that is the reason we are not doing what we did in the past,” said Debjani Ghosh, president, Nasscom.

Nasscom is now trying to understand the right way to predict the future, Ghosh said.

It is also a good time to acknowledge the transformation the industry is going through, she said, adding that it is going through a significant transformation where the focus is moving from costs to innovation to becoming partners in whole digital first journey of global companies. ,”

“The best way to predict the future is to talk to people in the frontline of the business, who are the CEOs and so Nasscom has started a CEO survey,” she said, adding that CEOs are optimistic about 2019 but at the same time are cautious about uncertainties.

September 18, 2018September 18, 2018

Nasscom says ‘Accelerate 10X’ will focus on 100 best deep-tech startups in India

In an exclusive interview to CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan, Debjani Ghosh, president and Rishad Premji, chairman at Nasscom spoke about information technology industry body’s new initiative called the ‘Accelerate 10X’.

Speaking about the initiative, Ghosh said, “We launched Nasscom 10K in 2013, when there were roughly handful of startups in India. The goal at that point was in 10 years, we will reach 10K startups and we will create India as a thriving startup ecosystem. Five years down, we are the third largest startup ecosystem in the world and it’s a growing startup ecosystem, seven percent growth.”

“Technology is changing everything around us. The advances in technology is providing opportunities to the entire industry to innovate, to disrupt and to find the kind of solutions to India’s problems that we have never been able to find till now. However, that requires a very high level of innovation, a very high level of capabilities and that requires scale. I think it’s time to look at the startup ecosystem and see how do we take them to that next phase where they can drive the kind of disruptive innovation that is required for India that will also bring in the scale,” Ghosh said.

“Accelerate 10X is an initiative under 10K that will focus on bringing together the entire ecosystem. From the accelerators to the venture capitalists (VCs), to the tech companies and to focus on 100 of the best deep tech startups in India. Invest in them and work with them for around 6 months to build the capabilities that will allow them to innovate at a global level and create the kind of solutions that are needed,” she added.

“Part of the magic of Nasscom is that it works very closely with the government. The magic is being able to bring all different stakeholders together. How do you bring government together? How do you bring corporates together? How do you bring venture together? How do you bring skilling together? How do you bring these different capabilities together to ultimately create magic in building these companies as it cannot work in silos,” Premji said.

“That is the credibility of Nasscom and the magic of Nasscom is that it’s able to work across different stakeholders and it has the credibility to work across different stakeholders,” Premji added.