Business
The Next Silicon Valley? It Might Be a Remote Village in India
From villages to governance to AI—India’s future lies in reimagining talent where the world least expects it.
05 June 2025
TL;DR
The blog reflects on how revolutions often start in overlooked corners, not capitals—like Sridhar Vembu building Zoho in rural Tenkasi, proving world-class innovation can thrive outside cities. His decentralized model of talent and wealth creation mirrors Ajay Piramal’s call for inclusive, last-mile growth. Carrying this spirit forward, Rishihood University has partnered with India’s Capacity Building Commission to reimagine civil service training, is launching its 10th Policy BootCamp, and has received approval to establish an Indic Center for Computational Thinking to bring India’s civilizational lens to AI. From villages to governance to technology, the common thread is recognizing and nurturing India’s hidden talent.
Table of Contents
The Next Silicon Valley? It Might Be a Remote Village in India
Most revolutions don’t begin in capitals.
They begin in corners. Quiet, unhyped, but purposeful.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in one such corner – Tenkasi, a remote town in southern Tamil Nadu. Along with other founders of Rishihood, I visited Sridhar Vembu, the visionary founder of Zoho, one of India’s most iconic tech companies.
But calling Zoho merely a ‘tech company’ feels like calling Vivekananda a motivational speaker. Technically true, but wholly inadequate.
What Sridhar has built is something far more radical – a billion-dollar business headquartered not in Silicon valley or India’s metro city, but in a village surrounded by coconut trees and the sound of birdsong.
It’s hard to put into words what I felt. (But an attempt here).
In Tenkasi, young men and women (many of them the first in their families to complete high school) are building world-class software. They’re writing code in modest village homes, experimenting with AI in rural R&D labs, and being mentored by seasoned engineers who’ve traded big-city boardrooms for a quiet countryside: unprecedented skill development.
Sridhar’s model is a radical reimagination of India’s talent geography. He has done what policy has only dreamed of – Made rural India matter again.
His model is to have a distributed wealth creation and localized economic systems. Training, respecting, and retaining talent in a decentralized way is a core ingredient to this model.
That same philosophy echoed during another moving conversation with Ajay Piramal, the visionary Chairman of the Piramal Group.
He spoke not of token outreach, but of designing for last mile connectivity and building systems that truly reach India’s remote communities and uplift them with dignity. What stayed with me most was his conviction that India@100 cannot just be about economic growth – it must be about inclusive growth, shared systems and reaching those most often left out.
Both these conversations were deeply aligned in spirit.
And that belief in people, especially in places we overlook, is what I carried with me as I returned to Rishihood.
Rishihood x CBC | Capacity Building Programme for Civil Services
That belief also shaped one of our biggest milestones this month. Rishihood University has signed a strategic partnership with the Capacity Building Commission (CBC), Government of India, to become a knowledge partner.
The CBC’s mandate is bold – to transform the Indian civil service and 25 million government staff into a purpose-driven, citizen-focused talent force. Together with CBC, we will design frameworks that blend systems thinking, empathy-based leadership, and the ethos of Indian Knowledge Systems: the truest meaning of capacity building
If we can reimagine how civil servants learn and lead, we can reimagine governance itself.
In June, we are hosting the Policy BootCamp, our flagship summer program that started 10 years ago with the same belief that bright and talented youth should engage with public policy and governance.
Rethinking AI Through an Indian Lens
Our proposal to establish an Indic Center for Computational Thinking has been approved by the Ministry of Education, one of only a few projects chosen nationwide after a rigorous review.
This center is born from a provocative question: What would Artificial Intelligence look like if it emerged from Indian paradigms and was shaped by Indic philosophy and consciousness?
The future of intelligence (and artificial intelligence) should not be written only in Silicon Valley. We must bring India’s civilizational lens to the frontiers of technology. It’s a moonshot that one must endeavor for.
From the quiet fields of Tenkasi,
To the corridors of governance,
To the neural networks of tomorrow,
There is a common thread that runs through it all.
India does not lack talent. We have always had thinkers, builders, creators, and carers. We lack national skills development systems that see it and support it.
We need to stop asking: “Where is the talent?”
And start asking: “What stopped us from seeing it?”
At Rishihood, we’re hoping to change that.
We’re working to build these environments. On campus. In government. In the cloud.
