Rafiq Dossani — Next Google will come from a small town in India

In an interview promoting his new book, India Arriving, Rafiq Dossani (former editor of Business India weekly) said that he sees the next Google coming from not Bangalore or even the developed world, but rather a small town in India.

Now, if you ask whether someone else might do that in India, and who that will be, well I have an answer that will probably surprise you. I think it will come not from Silicon Valley inspired startups, although several of those have been formed and are doing fairly innovative work, but catering mostly to the global markets. It will come when India’s local market reaches a certain level of maturity, and it’ll come from a small town. It won’t come from Bangalore or Bombay, Delhi, or one of those cities.

Dossani believes that the burgeoning entrepreneurial culture of India has reached much farther than the well-known urban centers, and that any city could be a hotbed for innovation.

I can give you one example. Indore is a small town by Indian standards, a very poor town, 2 million people, relies on soybean trading. You wouldn’t think Indore would be a bastion for software product development, but when I visited it, the first thing that struck me was when I spoke at a university, was how highly qualified the faculty was. And then speaking to students: how well trained they were. Even though their language was mostly Hindi and not English, they all used Google with complete fluency.

The entire interview can be found here.