Rise of Unicorns – UPSC GS2

Rising unicorns in India:
  • According to Credit Suisse report, “due to remarkable confluence of changes in the funding, regulatory and business environment, there has been an acceleration of 100 unicorns in India with a combined market capitalisation of $240 billion.”
  • Today, India has the third-largest number of unicorns globally.
Achievements and Prospect of rising unicorns in the development of India
  • Adoption of technology at an unprecedented pace:
    • Through the India-Stack and the Aadhaar systems, India has transformed digital identities.
    • With JAM trinity, we have pushed the envelope of financial inclusion and reduced system leakages.
    • The UPI platform has made digital banking accessible.
    • Similarly, our commitment for climate change at COP 21 has led to disruption in renewable energy, with India achieving a record low price of Rs 1.99 per kWh.
  • Emergence of healthcare, pharma and biotech companies: For e.g.
    • Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India have become household names in the country.
    • Hetero Labs has gained prominence as the “world’s largest producer of antiretroviral drugs”.
  • Data centered: With record low data prices at an average cost of $0.68 per gigabyte of data (the global average $4.21), as the migration to the cloud continues, the value of easy data management, protection and utilisation has exponentially risen.
    • E.g. Druva provides data protection solutions for managing enterprise data.
  • Logistics improvement: Logistics cost comprises nearly 14% of GDP in India compared to 8-10% of GDP in the US and Europe.
    • E.g. Ecom Express is an end-to-end technology-enabled logistics solutions provider to the e-commerce industry.
  • Transition towards sustainable energy use:
    • E.g. Greenko is replacing fossil fuels with integrated decarbonised energy and grid assets enabling affordable and sustainable energy focussed on “digitisation, decarbonisation and decentralisation”.
Conclusion: Moving forward, we must strive to get into the sunrise sectors of growth: Genomics, AI, clean and connected mobility, green hydrogen and advance cell chemistry.
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