Top Internet Entrepreneur Sanjeev Bhikchandani Slams Foreign Funds For Colonising Indian Startups Like East India Company

Indian internet entrepreneur Sanjeev Bikhchandani has claimed that foreign funds are the new East India Company which are on an onslaught to colonise successful start-ups in India by transferring the ownership overseas to skip Indian regulations and taxes, reports Economic Times.

Honoured with the Padma Shri, Bikhchandani, who founded the widely used jobs portal Naukri.com and is also an investor in food delivery platform Zomato said that an estimated market capital as high as Rs 17 lakh crore has been transferred abroad after young start-ups were forced to shift their company's domicile overseas in the return for funds that they need for powering growth.

Bikhchandani said that the situation had the shades of East India Company, whereby market, customers, developers and workforce involved in India, but 100 per cent ownership is foreign, investors are foreigners, and also the intellectual property and data have been transferred overseas.

Bikhchandani described the ongoing situation of foreign funds pushing Indian startups to flip the ownership overseas as an institutionalised transfer of wealth away from India at a very large scale. He added that the number of startups which have flipped domicile over the last five-seven years stood between 500-1,000.

It should be noted that Bikhchandani is a noted serial internet entrepreneur whose Bombay Stock Exchange-listed firm Info Edge (India) owns not just Naukri.com, but also the matrimony portal Jeevansathi.com and real estate search engine 99acres.com.