Editorial: Point taken, Piyush Goyal

In our largely humourless Union Ministry, Piyush Goyal, Minister for Commerce and Industry, exhibits a talent for snarkiness. One remembers how, in 2020, he refused an interview to Jeff Bezos, saying the American billionaire wasn't doing any “great favour” to India by offering to invest a miserly one billion dollars. Then, in August 2024, at a self-congratulatory event organised by e-commerce companies, he pricked the balloons by highlighting the industry’s predatory pricing and the damage it was doing to small retailers.

Last week, at Startup Mahakumbh 2025, the startup industry’s annual presentation of colours to Modi’s Vision 2047, Goyal handed out some tough love to the hosts. He chided them for focusing on low-tech services like 10-minute grocery delivery and “exploiting unemployed youth” instead of building something big in electric mobility, artificial intelligence and chip spaces. He went on to take a dig at “children of billionaires” playing startup pretend games by making “fancy ice-creams and cookies”.

Good points, minister, but in berating startups, Goyal has inadvertently held up a mirror to his own government’s failures on the employment and innovation fronts. If quick-commerce startups are working on projects that generate only low-skill jobs, that’s hardly their fault alone. As of mid-2024, the e-commerce sector employed 15.8 million, including 3.5 million women. That’s nothing to be scoffed at in a country with youth unemployment at 40 per cent and graduate unemployability at 50 per cent. Desperate young Indians will take what they can get, entrepreneurs will work with what they have. The burden of creating a vibrant ecosystem that works on big ideas for global impact cannot be borne by entrepreneurs alone. The government, corporate India and higher education all have roles to play. It’s fair to ask how much fat cat corporate India has contributed to the innovation ecosystem since the hefty tax break it received in 2019.

Indeed, as Goyal says, quality jobs are elusive because no innovative work is being done. But innovation is the product of long and deep investment in research and development (R&D) at every level of education and employment. India simply does not do that. Our embarrassingly low spend on R&D has remained stuck at 0.6–0.7 per cent of GDP for years, a far cry from China’s 2.6 per cent, the USA’s 3.5 per cent, and Israel’s 5.5 per cent. Indian corporations contribute just 36.4 per cent to India’s R&D spending, compared to over 70 per cent in China and the US.

The countries Goyal wants us to emulate all have long-established policies that foster innovation and pump billions into building research and incubation systems. China, for instance, invested over 3,335 billion yuan in R&D in 2023, reaching an R&D intensity of 2.65 per cent. Its investments in electric mobility, clean energy and rare earths go back 20 years. Nvidia, Alibaba, and Huawei are not accidental success stories; they are the result of long-term commitment, strategic investment, and close ties between universities, labs, and industry. Novo Nordisk invested $10 billion and 15 years to bring the wonder drug Ozempic to the market.

So, it’s a bit rich of Goyal to point out the lack of deep-tech breakthroughs when the groundwork has barely been done. And blaming e-commerce startups for providing low-end jobs when the government hasn’t created an alternative employment engine feels more like deflection.