The multi-billion-dollar valuations of Flipkart and Snapdeal are no pricing bubble, but a signal that India's technology boom has begun. The next five years will see a flurry of technology innovations that will transform the country as much as cellphones have over the past 15 years. This will be enabled by the availability of low-cost smartphones, the digital identity that Aadhaar has provided to hundreds of millions of people who lacked any documentation, and a host of exponential technology advances. A billion Indians will be joining the global economy during this decade.
There is a lot for Indian entrepreneurs to learn from Silicon Valley. But the bigger opportunities are for them to leapfrog it by solving the problems of the many rather than of the few. The same infrastructure lacuna that enabled India to create Aadhaar—lack of all technological legacy to have to worry about—offers it an opportunity to implement changes inarguably for the public good and to show the world how to create an entirely new digital infrastructure in areas such as the following.