On instability in the start-up space

Is there anything abnormal in people paying huge valuations for companies that end up going nowhere? Of course, there is. But in the free market, everybody has the right to be foolish and make foolish and smart decisions. So the government has no role in trying to adjudicate or set a base price or say this is right.

On start-ups in the semiconductor space

The way we have approached it after the PM approved the semiconductor policy is that we are building an ecosystem. We have today, apart from North America, the largest pool of semiconductor talent in the world. We have close to 1,00,000 engineers in India today who are working for the global majors, that are all highly talented and skilled in VLSI (very large scale integration). If they can start developing intellectual property, next generation devices and that is what the market is seeking and that is why we are funding start-ups. We have repeatedly missed the bus as a country in semiconductor electronics. The PM’s vision today is to build a semiconductor ecosystem and a position for India in the semiconductor supply chain in the world that China took 30 years to do and is still unsuccessful with.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar with guests at the Express Adda

On who will win the chip war

I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. Our approach to this is to see what is happening post Covid and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and see that there is certainly a re-drawing of electronics and semiconductor value chains. Before that there was an extraordinary amount of concentration of that supply chain in China. People have now realised that there needs to be a lot more diversification of that supply chain. Our semiconductor journey will not be one of instant gratifications. This is a medium to a long game.

On corporate governance and start-ups

The Indian start-up and innovation ecosystem is at the centre of attention for a lot of people around the world. There are global investments — billions of dollars at play. The tech space has attracted over 80 per cent of the FDI in 2022. A lot of this went into these start-ups. Therefore, for us, it’s a big asset that has to be protected, nurtured, grown, and expanded. So any news on the fringes that is bad news, that has a corporate governance link, is certainly not something that we are happy with. As much as innovation is important, so is integrity. Whether it is Twitter or big tech, small tech, Indian tech, foreign tech, we say that however smart or spiffy you are, there are laws in India that you have to comply with regardless of who you are.

Rajeev Chadrasekhar with Dr Rashmi Saluja, Executive Chairperson, Religare Enterprises Ltd

On the government’s relationship with Twitter

I don’t even want to suggest that it is adversarial. It is very easy to just keep saying that our expectation is that you do the right thing and not the right thing as I interpret it or you interpret it. The right thing is in the law. Our approach with Twitter is: look, you are a very small part of our digital economy ambitions, so don’t distract the whole process of building a trillion dollar digital economy by saying, you know, somebody threatened somebody to go to jail. That is unnecessary.

The guests at Express Adda

On reworking safe harbour norms

Governments world over lagged in creating guard rails for social media. They said don’t prosecute us and give us safe harbour and immunity. That played itself out in 2008 in India when we amended the IT act and I was the only member in Parliament in that standing committee who opposed it.

Guests at The Indian Express Adda held in Mumbai (Express photo by Pradip Das)

Then and now, I oppose it for the same reason: if there is a dispute between you as a citizen for content on a platform, by giving immunity to the platform, you are willingly dragging the government into this whole dispute and making the government adjudicate. When the government adjudicates it and says, look fake news should be managed, then the free speech crowd says that the government should not adjudicate. This is not a tenable model.

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekar’s interaction at The Indian Express Adda

Therefore I have started this discourse that in the Digital India Act (the successor to the IT act) we give the safe harbour as an exception, not the rule. Let the disputes be decided by the court of law. Today, there is no liability on the platform to ensure that it doesn’t have fake news. Misinformation is no longer an academic issue. It is being weaponised by state actors and vested interests. Every responsible government has as much of a responsibility to protect its citizens from this type of backlash of misinformation as they do to protect freedom of speech. The right to free speech is not to be equated with right to misinform.

On the Personal Data Protection Bill

The Bill is our understanding of what is right and wrong for our citizens and our innovation economy. It is common practice among big tech to push the  envelope as much as they can, in terms of how they can use their market power, their footprint to create these additional adjacent business lines, whether it’s AI or a search engine. We have to have mature, evolved regulatory frameworks that keep the citizens’ rights and benefits at the centre. The impact of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill will be a deep behavioural change in the platforms that have built a business model around harvesting and misusing personal data.

On crypto

With crypto, nobody has discouraged anything on web3 and blockchain innovation. What the government said was that if you invest in crypto, there are two things that you should be aware of. That you are investing in a very volatile asset class. Second is that you better make sure that when you buy a bitcoin or any US denominated crypto, you’re going through the RBI route of getting the foreign currency permissions through the LRS (Liberalised Remittance Scheme).

The world is looking at India and saying, you tell us what your regulatory views are. These principles of openness, safety, trust and accountability that we’ve laid down are now being followed by the US, and EU. I think we have a leadership role. We will continue to grow our digital economy to charge forward in innovation and leadership, but never forget that our citizens deserve and have the right to a safe and trusted cyberspace.

Guests listen to Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s interaction with Anant Goenka, Executive Editor, The Indian Express Group and Anil Sasi National Business Editor at The Indian Express Adda in Mumbai (Express photo by Pradip Das)

On the Opposition getting united

Rebranding or rebadging a bad product doesn’t change the product. When you’re ashamed of the product that you have driven in for the last 50-60 years, and you think you can pull a fast one over Indian people by changing the name, good luck. I don’t think people buy that rebranding and rebadging.

Anant Goenka, Executive Editor, The Indian Express Group interacted with Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar during the Adda (Express photo by Pradip Das)

They’ll look for substantive change, they’ll look for real discourse in our democracy, and if they can deliver that, then there is some meaning to this rebadging. Otherwise, I see it simply as the same gaggle of people who took us down a path that we don’t want to go down again, just calling themselves something else. UPA today is a bad word, they’ve realised that. So they’ve grabbed a new name.

QUICK QUESTIONS

○ Your advice to the young engineer who’s got an offer to relocate to Silicon Valley and work for Big Tech at a 50 per cent salary hike?

Don’t go, stay here.

○ The last app you downloaded?

Threads, yesterday.

○ Quick game…it’s a game called who wins. I’ll give you two options, you tell me who wins. So, who wins the chip wars?

The democracies of the world.

○ Who wins, Threads or Twitter?

I don’t care!

○ Who wins, Mark (Zuckerberg) or (Elon) Musk?

In EVs Musk, in rocketeering Musk, and I guess, in social media, Mark.

○ NVIDIA or Intel?

Today, NVIDIA. By far.

○ If you were still working in Intel, like you were when you were in the Valley, would you be sending your CV to NVIDIA today?

Hopefully, after 30 years, I would not be requiring to send my biodata anywhere.

○ How many telecom players will India end up with in the next 10 years? Two, three or four?

We should have a minimum of three, for sure. And it would be good to have four.

○ When was the last time you disagreed with the Prime Minister?

Never.

○ When was the last time the Prime Minister sought your advice?

The Prime Minister doesn’t seek our advice. We have regular reviews with him, and he’s very clear and precise on when he thinks we are not doing our job and he tells us that very candidly.

○ The one tech commentator that all of us interested in tech must follow.

There are so many different people depending on which area you’re interested in. But I certainly encourage people to get onto the dark internet and join some groups and hear 18-year-olds talk about the future of tech. That will be far more enlightening in terms of how far behind we all are in terms of our understanding of tech.

○ Can you rate the performance of the American tech regulators? Has it been good, bad, or average?

Very laissez-faire, very ‘let the markets decide’. That is certainly not what we need. Our people need a lot more
protection from market forces and big tech power.

○ The one skill that every school in India needs to urgently equip its students with to tackle AI?

I think every student must have basic tech skills. In terms of AI, I think it’s a bit of a question. Students should certainly think that you should not believe everything that you see on the Internet.

○ Policy or politics? What excites you more?

I think they’re both two sides of the same coin. I like making an impact, and I think being in government and being in politics allows you to make an impact.

○ User experience, user privacy — the two ends of a spectrum. Which side are you closer to?

I don’t think these are two ends of a spectrum. They’re two sides of a coin.

○ The one tech entrepreneur from India you look up to.

I like a lot of the young group that is coming out and building these things. The widespread confidence that we see today in the young generation is just absolutely inspiring.

○ The one Indian politician, not from the BJP, that you look up to.

I had a lot of respect for Rajesh Pilot. He was a student of my father’s in the Air Force, and he was the person who coaxed me to stay back in India in 1991 and pursue the cellular opportunity. I have a lot of respect for Deve Gowda, because as I told you, he showed me
the way.

○ You’re on a flight to Silicon Valley and it’s just two people on the plane. You have to choose Gandhi or Savarkar, who do you choose?

I will let both of them travel and I’ll step aside. I want to be here in India anyway.