Startups, Substance, and the Indian Dilemma: Rethinking Our Investment Priorities

In a rapidly digitizing world, where headlines celebrate unicorns and multi-million dollar fundraises, a deeper concern simmers beneath the surface—especially for emerging economies like India. The recent shutdown of Okra, a Nigerian fintech once hailed as a pioneer of open banking in Africa, after raising $16 million, offers a sobering reminder. It’s not merely a failed company. It’s a reflection of misplaced development priorities. And India should take note.

Like many African nations, India too is walking a fine line between digital dreams and ground realities. We are building a thriving ecosystem of APIs, digital wallets, cloud-native platforms, and frictionless payment gateways. These technologies undeniably offer value—but they are abstractions, floating far above the ground realities of farmers, artisans, and small manufacturers who still grapple with basic infrastructure, fragmented supply chains, and a lack of local processing units.

In a country where we continue to export raw cotton, coffee, spices, rice, and oilseeds only to import finished products at 5 to 10 times the price, we must ask: are we investing enough in the real economy?

Consider this: what if even a fraction of the funds raised by flashy fintech startups went into agro-processing, local value addition, and supply chain transformation?

India’s agriculture sector employs over 40% of the population, yet contributes only around 16–18% of GDP. The productivity gap is glaring. Small farmers still lack access to storage, cold chains, mechanized processing, and fair market linkages. The result? They sell at distress prices, while value gets captured elsewhere—often outside the country.

We are exporting raw turmeric and importing packaged turmeric capsules. We send raw mango pulp and buy back branded juices. Our cotton exports fetch pennies, while we import branded garments at exorbitant margins. Meanwhile, massive investments are pouring into startups building the next buy-now-pay-later app or tokenized credit scoring algorithm.

None of this is to discredit digital innovation. India’s fintech revolution has democratized banking, driven UPI-based payments to record highs, and fostered financial inclusion at an unprecedented scale. But the digital layer must sit atop a robust, productive foundation—not replace it.

Imagine if ₹130 crore (equivalent to $16 million) were invested into:

Setting up mini food parks with roasters, crushers, dryers, and packaging lines for turmeric, millets, pulses, and spices;

Building decentralized traceability platforms to assure global buyers of Indian origin, food safety, and organic certifications;

Enabling ESG-compliant value chains for export-grade coffee, tea, and forest produce from tribal regions;

Funding shared infrastructure for rural women-led collectives and MSMEs to scale up with dignity and autonomy.

Such investments would transform rural livelihoods, generate local employment, reduce import dependency, and position Indian produce for premium markets globally. It would also bridge the rural-urban divide that no fintech can address alone.

The lesson from Okra’s story is not that technology is irrelevant—it’s that technology cannot exist in a vacuum. Foundations matter. Factories matter. Farmers matter.

India’s startup story must go beyond code to include cold chains. Beyond valuation to include value addition. And beyond unicorns to create a robust and inclusive rural economy that can truly sustain digital innovation.

It’s time we rethink what real transformation looks like—and where our capital should truly flow. The next billion-dollar idea may not be an app, but a low-tech, high-impact processing plant that adds value where it’s long overdue: the grassroots.

#AgroProcessing

#ValueAddition

#FintechVsFoundation

#StartupIndia

#InclusiveGrowth

#RuralTransformation

#ESGIndia

#DigitalIndia

#MSMEdevelopment

#AgritechIndia