Nasscom Product Conclave: Not living up to expectations?

While poster boys of India's start-up ecosystem were missing this year, women's representation was also abysmal

As this year’s edition of Nasscom Product Conclave came to a close on Thursday, one could not but wonder if the start-up summit was heading in the right direction and witnessing the desirable evolution. While the prominent poster boys of India’s start-up ecosystem gave it a miss this year, there was also a glaring dearth of woman speakers on panels.
 
Chennai-headquartered AI-based fashion platform Mad Street Den’s co-founder Ashwini Asokan took to Twitter to express the gender bias. “Want to witness the state of sexism in Indian tech - go check out the #npc2016 feed. Go check out the NPC speaker list… 18 women among 200 speakers. Eat that for a stat. Manel after manel, speaker after speaker - same faces, same event, every goddamned year… [Sic]”, Asokan pointed out in a series of tweets. According to her, it was an “all male-fiesta”.

 
It is quite paradoxical because this is happening at a time when ‘women in entrepreneurship’ has emerged as one of the most favoured topics across start-up summits in the country. This, apart from, the Indian government’s thrust on woman entrepreneurship through Stand Up this year.
 

“We’ll have big elaborate “women in tech” & “diversity” panels at these events to discuss why there are no women. We'll have diversity funds... big talks about investors encouraging women founders & then they’ll show up to these sexist events & speak. No one boycotts…,” Asokan tweeted. She’s not alone in her observations; there are quite a few others who share her views.

 
Interestingly, the Nasscom-Zinnov report on Indian start-up 2016 said the women’s share in Indian start-ups had increased by one percentage point to 10 from nine per cent last year.
 
During the release of the start-up report on Wednesday, the Nasscom representatives were quite vocal about the need for the Indian start-up sector to buckle up soon to avoid tough competition from those from Israel and China. “We really worry about the fact that Israel and China are growing at 13 per cent and 14-15 per cent, respectively, and we are seeing 8-10 per cent growth. We really need to step up faster to do something with the government and industry participation,” Nasscom President R Chandrashekhar had said.

 
According to the Female Entrepreneurship Index of 2015, published by the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute, Israel and China were positioned at a comparatively good 34th and 48th ranks, respectively, while India occupied a slot far beneath, at 70th.
 
Also, though the conclave this year embraced a diversified list of interesting topics – spanning from artificial intelligence and fintech to BFSI, there was a significant reduction in the number of popular names from the panel sessions, compared with last year. A young entrepreneur who attended the conclave commented: “It is quite a disappointment for those who have come here spending a lot of money and time. Last year, there were the likes of Nikesh Arora (SoftBank) among the speakers.”

 
Clearly, this is not an encouraging sign.