Ever since the liberalisation of the Indian economy under the leadership of Prime Minister Narsimha Rao and his then finance minister Manmohan Singh, Indian economic policies have been more market oriented which has expanded the role of foreign and private investment.
This has led to a tremendous growth to fledgling small scale industries and start-ups which in turn has had a domino effect and led to the vast and conducive climate of innovation and solution to problems via entrepreneurship that exists in the country today.
It was in the early 2000s that the first change was introduced and a drastic change occurred between 2008-09.
India is a young country with the majority of the population being unemployed. The placement scenario is not too good. We, the youth of India, are more keen on setting up our own business rather than working for some multinational company.
The 2010s, especially, has become the decade for startups with entrepreneurial ventures becoming the country’s favourite fascination. A 2017 NASSCOM report suggests that India is home to 5000 tech startups and third largest start-up ecosystem after US and UK. That ecosystem includes stakeholders in the government, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, institutions and market opportunities. India ranks among the top five countries in the world in terms of number of startups founded. The Startup-ecosystem in India has seen a very slow growth last year. However, the introduction of GST and Make In India initiatives have given a momentum for change.
Entrepreneurship is a game of patience and persistence. Indian startups have undergone many developments. From being selected in the Google’s accelerator program, to raising funds from the Chinese investors, the startup ecosystem has been quite encouraging.
Stories of success inspire the youth to act and work to bring their own ideas to fruition. India’s entrepreneurial scene seems to be better than ever. Government and international organizations alike are investing in innovative ideas. The ideas of co-working spaces or incubators, to accelerate the start-ups by providing monetary and infrastructure support is giving a good push to the system.
It was on 16 January,2016 that our honourable Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi unveiled his ‘Startup India, Standup India’ plan, in front of the representatives of the startup community.
A closer look at the Indian startup ecosystem reveals that e-commerce and service-based startups primarily dominate the scene. One intriguing point can be made here that despite being one of the largest agricultural markets in the world, there is a severe lack of enough agro-based startups and solutions in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
And this goes just about becomes a metaphor of the current Indian startup scene. A large part of the Indian economy exists below poverty line and the geographical landscape of the country is dominated by villages and small towns. MNCs have a hard time penetrating and influencing these sectors and home-based and local startups are the only solution to existing issues.
With a flood of pitching events catered to startups, business meets, ideas workshops and entrepreneurial there is a host of opportunities but the question still remains at the end of the day as to whether they’re made good use of because there is plenty of room for improvement and development.
Startup India, Standup India
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Indians have always been particularly lauding towards the highbrows and to that extent never miss out on a whetstone to sharpen their grey matter. India is a fascinating country and we Indians are normally famous for our outstanding work ethic and intellect. India’s 132.42 crores people have an exclusive zest for life which makes the poker industry seek new challenges and summit new peaks. This is maybe why more and more Indians these days, be it college students, young pros and even most of the normal public are now taking up poker to channelize their creativity & aptitude. Along with the aforementioned, poker also has the USP of providing a chance of making big money. So there is no doubt that poker, and particularly online poker, was tailor-made for the Indian youth population.
Regular players spend up to eight hours every day playing poker online, often making up to INR 10,000 within 15 minutes. Of course, they do lose money as well, but the initial wins make for a heady rush. It’s becoming increasingly common to hear of online players cashing out anywhere between INR 50,000 to over INR 1 lakh during tournaments. Aditya Agarwal made headlines in July 2015 when he won $96,445 at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, considered one of the biggest poker tournaments. There are more than 50,000 people who play on homegrown online poker startups and several of these bootstrapped platforms make profits on annual revenues of at least INR 5 crore. Though it is difficult to estimate the size of India’s online poker industry, reports in 2015 pegged it at about $110-120 million. According to the Chief Financial Officer of Delta Corp, who bought Adda52 for INR 155 crore in a stockhand-cash deal in September 2015, Adda52 was a debt-free and cash-generating online poker startup that clocked revenues of INR 47 crore in the calendar year 2015 with core operational (EBITDA) margin of 30-35%.
Due to the largely unregulated nature of its gambling market, India doesn’t have a history of online poker. But the Facebook app Zynga Poker proved to be a masterstroke for the trade with casual card players who discovered a whole new game called Texas Hold’em. This was a natural progression for those who used to play ‘Flash‘ earlier. Plus, the intricacies and depth of Hold’em captured in Teen-Patti players and suddenly poker became the logical sport to choose. Way back in 2006, Teen-Patti, cropped up as an Indian poker variant, not too dissimilar from the British game three-card brag or the US home-game favourite, started to gather interest from players in India. Being one of the most popular card games of all times, it wasn’t long before it captured the strong attention of the Indian masses. With the advent of digitalization, many India-based digital companies also wanted to tap the popularity that poker had begun to enjoy among the masses. Thereby, many Indian gaming companies, in the recent past, began to develop online platforms for playing the card game. Online poker startups such as Adda52, Poker-Baazi and Spartan Poker started gaining fast popularity and generating mammoth turnovers.
To the persisting regulatory obstacles, playing professionals point out that when universities like Harvard and MIT include poker as a course, one understands that it has been recognized as a skill-based game on a global level and it’s only a matter of time before India acknowledges it too. Co-founder of PokerBaazi, Puneet Singh opines that the state governments too will be convinced in support of the game as the number of startups increases in this space. He’s hopeful to see a slow but gradual lenience in the regulatory issues surrounding the sport, where it’s not being viewed as a gambling sport but a skill-based game.
Professor of strategic management at IIM Kozhikode, Deepak Dhayanithy sets an eye opener for those who dismiss poker as a hobby sport or a gambling game. The avant-garde teaches a class on competition strategy using the game of poker at the management institute. “you learn to read people, their body language, the subtle nonverbal clues, their motivations and how they react to specific circumstances. And lastly, it’s all about managing your resources — the chips,” says Dhayanithy.
Although India has had an epical history of gambling sports, they were never practised in commercial entertainment hubs. With the advent of Westernization in India, recreational centres such as nightclubs, bars, pubs, discotheques have gathered immense publicity and widespread acceptance among the younger generations. Relying on the fact that the average age of Indians would be 25 by the year 2020, it becomes imperative that the tastes of Gen Y would burgeon and an irrefutable inclination towards a zoetic nightlife would give casinos a substantial heap space in the recreational market. An entity peculiar to the west would find solid ground in the subcontinent continuing at the present pace of scaling, and the day is not too far, given the legislature and administration approves of them, which isn’t unlikely either.
Given that the sport involves monetary stake, it is more than apprehendable that the first ones to indulge in poker would be the business elites and of course the celebrities. Furthermore, celebrities are always coveted as the face of a brand. In a country like India where Bollywood superstars and Cricketers can manoeuvre emotions of the mass, credibility scales are high that once celebrities start endorsing the players in the poker market, it wouldn’t have to fish for clientage. The only thing that stands between are the laws governing the practice of the sport. Once that barrier loses its height, drawing public interests isn’t going to be a tough ask. And given the promising amendments and lenience getting associated with the upmarket trade, we can only imagine it to thrive the Indian market with flying colours.
The evergreen lustre in the scopes of making quick money is sure never to wither from the Indian society given its socio-economic conditions that crave for financial upliftment. Once it finds an undefeatable claim to fame through media and advertisements (for the common mass is hardly aware of the returns anyway), iconoclasts will abound. No matter whether the masses are educated of the strategies or not, given the vulnerability persisting in the present day, they would somewhere believe it to be a lucrative gamble. And once first-time investments start yielding, which is inevitable by mathematical probability, this practice would suffuse like a pandemic in the upcoming 10 years.
Despite the prevailing negations involved, once the adult generation comes around to believe in the prospects that poker provides, while it continues to be practised in educational institutes as means to exemplify life and career strategies, its non-financial dimensions are sure to open up as well. Once they are inculcated in the good spirit, like those chess and other mind games, breaking down social taboos on poker would be just a matter of a few years. The very moment a second generation starts believing in its positive aspects, there should be no reason why the poker industry will not skyrocket in India in the next 10 years.