“Why can’t chief ministers of Indian states be like CEOs of corporations and compete with each other? That’s what investor and entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath believes India needs to learn from China to make big things happen.
The same person here makes a lot less money. Kamath, a school dropout, is best known as the co-founder of Zerodha, one of India’s largest stockbroking firms. He has also invested in several businesses, including Licious, Nourish You, Pee Safe, Subko, and Ather, an electric scooter maker.
“The one thing people don’t take cognizance of when it comes to India is that the cost of putting on a megawatt is probably 30-40% cheaper than it is in the West. Somebody who’s doing the plumbing and the piping around a data center in America gets paid $300,000. In 2025, he bought a 5 per cent stake in D’yavol Spirits, a company founded by actor Shah Rukh Khan and his son Aryan Khan.
Speaking to NDTV CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal at the NDTV World Summit, Kamath said that India has the opportunity to build a great tech company, but what it lacks is the “risk capital” similar to the US and China. We also don’t take cognizance of the fact that power in India is actually significantly cheaper than in many geographies in the world,” he said.
