Start-up industry body ADIF's top boss Sijo Kuruvilla George quits amid disagreement with member

Sijo Kuruvilla George

Start-up industry body Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) saw top level exits earlier this month, including its entire core operations team and top boss Sijo Kuruvilla George who was its executive director. Lately, ADIF allegedly had disagreements with one of its key start-up members, multiple sources told Moneycontrol.

George’s last day at the organisation was on October 15. As of March, ADIF had over 490 start-up members and individuals. These included prominent names such as Matrimony.com, Innov8, GOQii, Sheroes, Paytm and MapMyIndia, to name a few.

According to sources, the start-up body that was meant to be neutral and functioning for the cause of Digital India and Indian start-ups, was allegedly being pressured to back one of its fintech members on certain causes, which led to the team headed by George deciding to quit.

“Although the fintech player has been a great supporter of ADIF, sometimes differences of opinions occur. There was an expectation that the body would largely support them. There were other delays in operations as well,” one of the sources cited above said.

Moneycontrol could not reach ADIF for comments. Multiple members and office-bearers were contacted by Moneycontrol over phone calls and messages. Responses were awaited at the time of publishing and any comments on the same will be updated in this story.

With no day-to-day team and leadership in place in the organisation, a few members are thinking whether to continue with ADIF or create another association that would be more neutral, according to people close to the developments.

Operational for over a year, ADIF has been actively advocating and participating in legal cases against big tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Apple, in a bid to help Indian start-ups. One of the key cases it is involved in is with regards to the amount of commissions being charged from developers on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store.

Both the technology giants were facing flak for not allowing third party payment gateways to be used by the app developers in its app store ecosystem, forcing the developers to pay 15-30 percent commissions using its own gateway. Third-party payment gateways such as Razorpay and Paytm charge lesser commission on transactions of about 1.5-5 percent.