High taxes to brain drain: Financial advisor flags 10 flaws stalling India’s global innovation race

Akshat Shrivastava, Founder of Wisdom Hatch, has urged Indians to step away from conspiracy theories and instead confront hard truths about the nation’s developmental challenges. In a forthright post, he dismissed the idea of a “grand conspiracy” against Bharat, calling on people to “aggregate all the facts” and take a rational, process-driven approach to improving their lives.

Shrivastava listed 10 pressing concerns: high taxes, poor infrastructure, low GDP per capita despite boasting of being the world’s fourth-largest economy, lack of significant participation in emerging industries like AI and crypto, and an accelerating talent drain due to reservation policies — leading to “the highest millionaires leaving per number of millionaires ratio” globally.

He also criticised entrenched corruption, compromised media, sluggish courts, crony capitalism without innovation, and an environment where “marketing and manipulation outweigh viable substance.”

He cautioned that fixing these systemic issues could take at least a decade, even in the best-case scenario, warning that by then India risks missing out on the next wave of major technological breakthroughs. “Next generation pays the price,” Shrivastava wrote, adding, “Change is an outcome of a process. If the process sucks, even simple goals can’t be achieved.”

The post quickly gained traction online, sparking a flurry of strong reactions. One user wrote: “Our entire national identity is our ability to multiply an extremely low per capita GDP number by 1.5 billion so we can have a nice sounding number to throw around. The truth is we can barely clean the cow shit and garbage from our streets. Innovation bahaut door ki baat hai.”

Another argued for a root-level overhaul of the system: “Our system needs to be deep cleaned from the roots first, then comes everything else. It’s on the shoulders of educated, innovative and honest people, rather than blaming the corrupted system and expecting change through it.”

A third likened Shrivastava’s comments to a no-holds-barred corporate review: “This reads like a brutally honest performance review that HR would never let you give! Sometimes the truth hits harder than motivational speeches. The brain drain may not be just about money; it is about systems that work!”