Siddharth Shetty, 26, is a Fellow at iSPIRT Foundation, a non-profit technology think tank, where he works on India Stack.

Background

I was born in Bombay. But then, when I was young, my parents shifted to Goa. And that's where I grew up for most of my life. After grade 11, I started a company of my own, which was into crowdfunding. So basically a platform where where people could raise funds for different ideas, projects and causes. After that, I ended up moving to Bangalore. And that's where a sort of got in touch with the volunteers that are building out India's digital infrastructure. And so over the last six years, have been working one primarily on how do we really empower individuals with control over their data? How do we give them agency, both at a technological level, but also the legislative level?

People, society and tech

I care about people. And that's why I am excited by the power of technology. Technology is sort of secondary to the fact that can we truly empower individuals and businesses, economically and otherwise to go on to lead better lives, and technology plays a very crucial enabler in that journey, along with, of course, other political and economic structures which I do feel also need to change.

When you think about that problem, you quickly realize that there is no one company that can solve it, or no one government service provider, particularly given the diversity that we have in India. So focus on what societal problems we have in front of us whether it's democratizing credit to small businesses, and then saying, okay, these are the key enablers. And in this playground, here's how people can come together. And so then can we design the right set of equipment that really empowers these individual actors to go on to solve that problem.

Climate change, inequality, health

As someone who's, who's, who's 26, and looking at the world ahead of us, we have a range of problems. Climate change, serious inequalities, when it comes to wealth and we living in crisis after crisis. We've gone from the pandemic, to war, to now economic crisis around us and in many countries. We don't have clear solutions on the table.

Need for new political, economic and market structures for a different world

The previous generations were living in an environment of scarcity. The political structures, the economic structures, the market structures were governed around exploiting natural resources to create base level abundance of our needs. I think a large part of society has achieved that there's still a long way to go. But for the parts of the society that have achieved that, it's clear, these current frameworks aren't holding up. And so the traditional role of a company of a corporation needs to change.

Personal motivations

The whole aspect of credit, democratization was very personal. I saw it firsthand, my father, as I mentioned, when we moved to go up, because he set up a factory, which was a small business. And most of manufacturing, small businesses, in India is a mess. And so that's what happened, he had taken on a set of debt and, and a whole bunch of complications arose from that, I personally witnessed that full cycle of his attempts to grow but not getting access to sufficient capital when he needed it, it heavily being tied to physical collateral. And the fact that if you were very large, the banks would pay attention, if you're too small, you basically get screwed by the banks.