Piyush Goyal reacts to criticism over startups remark, terms it 'unfortunate'

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on April 7 said that while he was widely criticised for urging startups to innovate better, specifically citing Former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai, his intent was to shakeup an ecosystem to the urgency of the situation.

"I have been bashed up a little bit by Mohandas Pai in the last few days for my appeals for startups to focus on innovation. But I do believe it is unfortunate that the whole issue of innovation was criticised. Sometimes it is important to shake up an ecosystem to make it realise the urgency of the situation," Goyal said while addressing an event in Mumbai.

Former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai on April 3 asked Piyush Goyal to not "belittle" Indian startups following Goyal's comments around re-evaluating their purpose and true value and aim for international prominence.

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the second Startup Mahakumbh on April 3, Goyal said, “We need to go global and think big. When we look at deep tech, there are only about 1,000 startups in the ecosystem, and it is a disturbing sign. It is upon the startups to focus either on wealth creation in the short run or rising to the international scale.”

Goyal on April 7 also asked the larger players in the Indian industry to support smaller players to help upgrade their quality of products to global standards, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said on April 7.

"Quality is not expensive, half of the issue with quality is a mindset problem, I think, the second thing is more testing...it is just training the smaller players and those who are not quality conscious yet and every industry will have o go down that path of supporting smaller players to come up to speed with today's demands."

"We as a nation have to collectively focus on supporting each other and focus on high quality in goods and services," he said, adding that Indian industry needs to prioritise made in India products.