New Delhi: Infosys Co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani on Thursday said India will have more than a million startups by 2035.
He was delivering the opening remarks at the India Policy Forum 2026 conference, organised by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER).
Nilekani, who also chairs NCAER’s governing board, made a strong case for supporting entrepreneurship. He said India’s startup count grew from 10,000 to 150,000 in just 10 years, a pace he expects to continue.
He urged that AI be made available in all Indian languages, adding that significant value and productivity gains would follow from giving a billion people access to AI.
At a separate session of the conference, panellists discussed how India can build more effective and accountable regulatory systems. The session was chaired by Professor S. Mahendra Dev, Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the prime minister.
It was noted that regulation, largely carried out through statutory regulatory authorities, remains deeply embedded in India’s economic landscape, and that regulatory intervention is often necessitated by market failures linked to asymmetric information, negative externalities, and market power.
The panel called for stronger checks and balances within regulatory institutions and structural reforms to the legal frameworks governing them, the NCAER said in a series of posts on X.
The session featured Ajay Shah of XKDR Forum, Dr Devesh Kapur and Dr Pravin Krishna of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr Rana Hasan of NCAER’s Centre for Economic Growth and Development.
Separately, a team of economists and NCAER academic faculty released the India Policy Forum 2025 volume, containing research papers presented at the previous IPF conference. The papers, based on original research, were published after revisions incorporating IPF discussants’ comments, floor discussions, and editorial review, with support from an international research panel.
The volume was released by NCAER Vice Chairman Manish Sabharwal, NCAER Non-Resident Senior Fellows and Professors Karthik Muralidharan and Pravin Krishna, and NCAER Secretary and Operations Director Dr Anil Sharma.
The release was followed by a keynote address on “Savings and Investment Potential in India” by NITI Aayog Vice Chairman Dr Ashok Lahiri.
