I wrote this about six years ago about the opportunity the domestic Indian market offered:

Indian technology companies have a significant opportunity ahead of them to take up leadership in the global technology marketplace. Let the existing set of software and services companies focus on the world’s developed markets. We need a new crop of firms that can focus on solving the problems of the domestic market in India and then take these solutions to other markets like ours. Let us first discover India, and then conquer the New Emerging World.

How do we begin? Here are three questions whose answers each lead to large potential markets. How can we make a connected computer accessible to every employee in India? How can we make software part of the DNA of Indian engineering colleges? How do we transform rural India?

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Indian companies need to start looking inward for a change. Few industries in the world have achieved global scale without the benefit of a large domestic market. Indian IT companies have made a great beginning in both software engineering and business process outsourcing services for global organisations. The time has now come to look within and create the new, emerging, technologically-advanced India.

The use of new technology can make our industry more efficient. It can make our engineering colleges better producers of the human resource that is so critical for our continued long-term success. It can also enable our rural population to get out of the development trap that they find themselves in, and open up a huge new set of consumers. The time has come for a Discovery of India.