Every year, TechSparks, YourStory’s flagship startup-tech summit, brings together entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and aspiring founders under one roof to exchange ideas and spark the next wave of innovation. The 17th edition carried that spirit forward, but with a sharper question at its core: how can India stop being a consumer of technology and products, and start building them for itself and the world?
The final day of the summit made one thing clear. Building for India starts with its classrooms, its engineering colleges, and even the labels on its food.
Educating 247 million primary and secondary students is a monumental task. But according to Sushma Boppana, CEO of Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions, and Santhosh Viswanathan, Vice President and Managing Director for APJ at Intel, India’s biggest hurdle is structural, not numerical. In a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, the two leaders discussed what student success now looks like when schooling remains rooted in nineteenth-century methods while society has leapt into the intelligence era.
“When you come into the real world... you don’t have... work time and... tech time. Tech and work are merged together,” Viswanathan said, calling for technology to be embedded natively into everyday learning. He pointed to AI’s ability to personalise instruction, so a child who loves cricket could learn quantum mechanics through the sport.
Boppana, drawing on Sri Chaitanya’s reach of two million learners, said character now outweighs test scores. “In this generation if we are able to build up resilience, engagement, accountability these are the three aspects which are more important than academic education,” she said.
Viswanathan also flagged India’s severe compute deficit, noting that compute penetration is under 10% in India, compared to 95% in the US and 75% in China. With 250 million young Indians set to enter the workforce in the next five years, he called solving their livelihood question both the most profitable and most significant problem to tackle.
Carrying the conversation from schools to engineering colleges, Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Institute Professor at IIT Madras and Chairman of IIIT Hyderabad and the ITEL Foundation, asserted that India has the talent to build any technology. Yet, he pointed to a glaring paradox: “We can pretty much develop all technologies, and yet we import pretty much every product.”
The Padma Shri recipient said the weakest link in Indian engineering education is that students are not taught to build. He advocated discarding half the current curriculum to make room for hands-on creation, and said young founders, especially from Tier II, III, and IV cities, are the genuine risk-takers who can drive national transformation.
On AI, Jhunjhunwala urged India to chart its own course. Instead of chasing trillion-parameter cloud models, he said the country should focus on edge computing, running compact, retrained open-weight models on phones, laptops, and low-power devices. Through ITEL, he is also bringing scientists and startups together to solve civic challenges such as urban transit and waste management.
Rounding off the day was a candid conversation on trust. Revant Himatsingka, better known as Food Pharmer, spoke about his high-stakes founder shift after years of calling out India’s biggest food brands. Having turned down crores in brand deals, he launched Only What’s Needed (OWN) to give consumers honest alternatives.
“If I make a mistake, I am done,” he admitted. OWN puts its nutrition label on the front in large font, shows every ingredient’s exact percentage in a pie chart, and offers a QR code with labels in major Indian languages. The brand has spent almost nothing on marketing, choosing instead to hold public board meetings and invite people to its factories.
His advice to founders was simple: question the industry’s artificial rules. “If I had listened to them, I would have been one of the many. Because I broke those rules, I stood out.”
The three-day conference ended with a clear message. India has the talent, the scale, and the problems worth solving. Whether it’s fixing classrooms, rethinking engineering education, or rebuilding consumer trust, the next chapter of Indian innovation will be written by those willing to take the risk and build.