August - 2015 - issue > Last Word
India's affair with the Silicon Valley
Neelam Deo
California's tech industry contributes 10% or around $230 billion to the state's GDP. And if California were a country, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world at $2.3 trillion; India's is at just under $2 trillion.
Indian Americans constitute barely half a million of California's population of 39 million, but they are a significant part of the state's tech sector. Reports of the, School of Information at the University of Berkeley in California suggest that Indian-Americans have contributed to 15% of tech start-ups on the West Coast, and are associated with 8% of all tech and engineering start-ups across the U.S.
While the tech-profile of California is well-known, other lesser-known threads also bind India to the state-for example, Indian immigrants to California in the early 20th century formed the Ghadar Party there to fight British colonialism back home. California also gave the U.S. Congress its first Indian-origin member, Dalip Singh Saund; he was elected from the state's 29th district in 1957.
But it was the connection with Silicon Valley that gave India an image in the U.S. and globally of a growing technology power.
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