Tech grads shun regular jobs in favour of start-ups

BANGALORE: Graduates from many of India’s top technology and management institutes are turning to entrepreneurship in large numbers, unfazed by a

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lack of funding in a slowing economy and seeing that the opportunity cost of foregoing regular employment in a tepid job market is not too great.

Many of the new ventures such as online education portal btechguru.com do not require large amounts of money to be set up and can get going with support from family, friends or incubation centres of educational bodies.

Btechguru, aimed mainly at engineering graduates, was started by Balaraju Kondaveeti, 26, a student of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras who is graduating this year. The portal, which will tap remote engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu by providing technical and soft skills to engineering students, was incubated at IIT-Madras and is set to be launched as a commercial venture.

“Both these states have some 700 engineering colleges out of the total 1,400 in India. We will seek help from our network and friends in these states to provide the service,” says Mr Kondaveeti.

A top official of the N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (Nsrcel) says there has been growing interest in setting up businesses despite the economic downturn. While Nsrcel received 14 proposals between April and November 2008, the number has doubled in the three months since November, says its COO A Suryanarayan. Nextgen, another start-up at Nscrel, wants to implement clean technology while Radiffinity wants to use Radio Frequency Identification for asset management in large corporations.

“Despite the economic downturn and the paucity of funding, more graduates are turning entrepreneurs because the job market is down and they don’t want to do jobs that they don’t like. In the master’s course in entrepreneurship at IIT Madras, this year seven graduates are turning entrepreneurs compared to two a couple of years ago,” says btechguru’s Mr Kondaveeti.

IIT Madras’ Arul Sekar, 25, who loves mountaineering and hiking along with Sridhar L, is starting an adventure tourism company called ecologin.org which enables people visit unexplored regions and provide jobs to local people.

“We have been explaining our business model to village panchayats and the fishing community. We are talking to investors for funding of Rs 30-50 lakh,” he says. According to Sudhir Sethi, chairman and managing director, IDG Ventures India, there are 1,000 technology-based start-ups in India. IDG Ventures is investing some Rs 300 crore in early-stage start-ups with varied interests in the next three years.

“Technology students are interested in new areas like Web 2.0, cloud computing and clean technology,” says S Sadagopan, founder director of the International Institute of Information Technology- Bangalore (IIIT-B). At IIIT-B, some 12 students are starting their own ventures this year.

“The kind of innovation that bigger companies have failed to do are being done by small companies and thus major players are tying up with these companies,” observes Prof Sadagopan.