How ‘Digital India’ is driving Big Tech investments into the country

When Rinchen Wangdi Bhutia in 2016 moved from the hilly northeastern Indian state of Sikkim to Kolkata, one of the country’s metro cities, he was just a face in a crowd. Bhutia quit his corporate life and started a cloud kitchen in 2023. A year later, he started posting short videos of his simple home-made meals. Strangers turned to followers and views into food orders. Success followed.

Today, he runs two restaurants, specializing in dumplings, in Kolkata. He has more than half a million followers, and his reels regularly notch a million-plus views. The country has the highest number of users across social media platforms such as Facebook (350 million-plus), Instagram (413.8 million) and video app YouTube (over 467 million), according to data from Statista. Messaging app WhatsApp reportedly has over 500 million users in India.

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in February said India was the company’s second-largest market.

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