How Chinese Rule Indian Startups And Control Our Economy.

When it comes to technology start-ups, Indian firms have the Chinese as their godfather. 

China, the ultimate ruler of technology has our nation literally in its hands. it may seem practically impossible right now but the reality is that the Chinese own major part of the Indian start-ups.

Since the onset of the virus, there has been a major change in the Indian education sector. Students have shifted to online education and apps like Byjus are a total hit right now.  But the biggest factor here is that byjus has a major role of the investors from outside India. For example, China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd has a significant holding value in Byju's  online education application which is being used by majority of the students right now.

Not only Byju's,  many other education start ups in India also have high level of Chinese investment including from Chinese Tencent. Some examples in this segment are Vedantu, Unacademy, Toppr etc.

Some major Indian Start-ups and their Chinese Investors are summarised in the picture below. an

There are two major players who are running the Indian start-up scenario. One is Alibaba and the other one is Tencent.

The major reason for all these investments is that the Chinese follow the model of- plus one. This model basically means that shifting or expanding operations out of China to benefit from cheaper labour, new markets, and less domestic vulnerability.

There have been a few issues associated with this. Data leakage is a major issue with comes with the investments that the Chinese make in the Indian companies. In 2016, questions were raised on Paytm about the data security of the users to which the spokesperson said that Alibaba has a stake in Paytm but it is originally an Indian entity only. Even if there have been privacy issues and data breach issues, there have been times when the companies have stepped forward and have told that the data isn’t shared. But the fact is that we are so spellbound and tech-savvy, all our data is actually with someone. From the most sensitive information to the most useless one. We are all under someone. And guess what? It would have been better if we were under our own domestic people. But the reality is that there are extremely less fully-owned domestic firms.

All these investments come with a positive and a negative. But one thing is for sure, we aren’t India anymore, we are ultimately under someone who is running everything in our country.

credit:  Nandini Marwah