How India's Chess Success Can Inspire a New Generation of Entrepreneurs?

India’s successful moon shot Chandrayaan-3 has eclipsed an extraordinary feat, this time in chess.?It has been a spectacular few weeks for Indian chess. Praggnanandhaa has become the first Indian player after Viswanathan Anand to reach?the finals of the FIDE World Cup against Magnus Carlsen, perhaps the best player in history.?This marks a significant milestone.

Indian Chess on the Global Stage

The 2023 FIDE World Cup has seen 4 Indian grandmasters – Praggnanandhaa , Dommaraju Gukesh , Arjun Erigaisi and Vidit Gujrathi reaching the quarterfinals. 16-year-old Aaditya Dhingra from Gurugram achieved an exceptional feat by elevating his?FIDE rating from 2000 to 2600 in just two months.?Meanwhile, 17-year-old Grandmaster D Gukesh has become the country's highest-rated player, surpassing?Viswanathan Anand's 36-year reign.

India’s women chess players’ accomplishments are equally noteworthy.? Among them, 17-year-old Velpula Sarayu 's victory in Spain against masters with ratings over 600 points higher is an outstanding feat. Her performance rating of 2575 is unprecedented for a player ranked at 1845.

Anand’s Popularity and Academic Associations

Several factors account for India’s astonishing rise as a chess superpower.?Perhaps the most important is Viswanathan Anand, whose success and advertisements with GNIIT revolutionised the sport and made millions of parents equate chess with academic excellence.

The general perception is that if you play chess - it will help with your studies, especially in logical reasoning, mathematics, and physics, and some surveys prove that chess players are better mathematicians. We get as many as 50 calls daily from interested parents, says Dhanajay Ramraje, who runs the Chanakya Chess Club in Mumbai.

Chess is growing at the grassroots across the country and is now included in the school curriculum in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. Chess clubs and tournaments are also pervasive, creating a movement akin to cricket’s influence.?This democratisation of chess has made a fast-growing funnel for talent, with at least a million people playing local tournaments across the country, including Uber and auto-rickshaw drivers and construction workers who sign up for free entry tournaments. Prize money and sponsorships, though still a trickle, are growing fast with the sport’s success. As a result,?India has 73 grandmasters now, up from 20 in 2007, and seven players ranked among the top 100 in the world . However, the best is yet to come.

Lessons from Chess for Mass Entrepreneurship

Our success in chess has great parallels with mass entrepreneurship.?For India to prosper and reach its potential, we cannot have just a handful of large firms like Tata or Reliance and a few thousand tech startups. We need a grassroots movement of millions of young people who want to start and build their businesses rather than seeking elusive good jobs in every district and village. These are not just gig workers or necessity entrepreneurs who are forced to start small businesses such as tea shops or grocery stores out of compulsion, but entrepreneurs drawn to an opportunity and are growth-oriented.

Over the past five years, GAME and its partners have been working on how to unlock such a grassroots movement. Our partner, Udhyam Foundation , runs a highly effective and fast-growing entrepreneurship program in Govt. Schools across 10 states, including Delhi and AP.?The goal is to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills in students in grades 9-12 with programs like?Business Blasters , which provides seed capital to studentpreneurs to start their businesses.

By 2030, the goal is for every young Indian to have the experience of launching a business.

Drawing inspiration from the world of chess, we need thousands of venture clubs, incubators and accelerators in every school, college, ITI and district. Competitions like Shark Tank are highly effective in inspiring young entrepreneurs, and the key is to build a pyramid of competitions that build a huge funnel of entrepreneurial talent.?Indeed, obtaining seed capital and accessible loans is challenging for first-time entrepreneurs; nonetheless, it is both essential and doable.

In conclusion, the sky's the limit for what we can achieve, whether in chess or entrepreneurship. As we celebrated #WorldEntrepreneurshipDay this week, remember that the lessons we've learned from our grandmasters can be just as valuable in entrepreneurship. Both require strategic thinking, a willingness to take calculated risks, and the resilience to keep going even when the odds seem against us. Like how we have nurtured an exceptional pool of chess talent, we have the same potential to encourage a new generation of Indian entrepreneurs. So, let’s celebrate our victories, learn from our setbacks, and look ahead to the opportunities because the best is yet to come.