OPINION | Why small-town India could produce the next wave of business leaders

India’s business future may increasingly be shaped beyond the metros, as digital access, local knowledge, and hard-earned resourcefulness widen the geography from which leadership can emerge.

For decades, India’s mental map of business leadership has been remarkably metropolitan. Mumbai produced financiers and industrialists; Bengaluru, technologists; Delhi-NCR, corporate executives and entrepreneurs. Talent from elsewhere was expected to board a train or plane, acquire the right degree and address, and enter these established centres of opportunity. That map is beginning to look dated.

The next wave of Indian business leaders may still pass through the metros, but many will be shaped in Indore, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Surat, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Rajkot and scores of less celebrated towns. This is not a sentimental claim about “Bharat” defeating “India”. It is an argument about where problems are visible, where ambition is becoming more practical, and where digital access is reducing the penalty of distance.

The numbers suggest why this matters. The government said in early 2025 that more than half of DPIIT-recognized startups were emerging from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. By March 2026, the total number of recognised startups across India had crossed 2.23 lakh, with the government attributing more than 23 lakh direct jobs to them. The startup story remains heavily influenced by the large hubs, but its geography is plainly widening.

Digital participation is further widening the base. The IAMAI’s 2025 Internet in India findings, reported in early 2026, put India’s active internet-user base at about 958 million, with rural India accounting for 57 per cent, or roughly 548 million users. A rural internet user is not automatically an entrepreneur, of course. But a large, connected population changes who can learn, compare prices, discover markets, build an audience and transact. Even more revealing is language: the report said 870 million users accessed the internet in Indic languages in 2025.

Payments have undergone equally profound democratisation. NPCI recorded more than 23.2 billion UPI transactions in May 2026 alone. A merchant in a district town no longer needs sophisticated banking infrastructure to accept digital payments from a customer hundreds of kilometres away. The distance between a small enterprise and a national market has shrunk dramatically.

Smaller cities can cultivate forms of leadership that a metropolitan boardroom easily underestimates. A founder who grows up around a trading family, a farm economy, a cluster of workshops or a neighbourhood retail market often learns early how trust works when paperwork is thin. They see delayed payments, seasonal demand, transport uncertainty and the difference between a customer who says yes and one who pays. Such experience does not guarantee sound judgment. It can, however, produce leaders less dazzled by presentation and more attentive to cash flow, reputation and execution.

The strongest businesses from non-metro India will often be those that treat local proximity as an advantage rather than an address to escape. Jaipur-based skincare brand Minimalist is one example of a consumer business built outside the usual technology hubs. Its origin in Jaipur matters because it shows that a digital-first brand can be conceived and run beyond the country’s largest metros; it does not mean geography alone explains its success.

There is a wider point here. A business serving farmers, kirana stores, small factories, coaching students, regional travellers, or first-time digital consumers cannot be designed only from elite urban assumptions. Leaders who understand these markets intimately may spot demand that is invisible in a metro-focused conversation. They may build more patiently, with lower fixed costs and a sharper sense of what customers will adopt.

Business schools like Jaipuria Institute of Management, with campuses in Tier-2/3 cities like Lucknow, Noida, Jaipur and Indore, serve this purpose at two levels: designing live projects for students to treat the local enterprises as serious laboratories rather than inferior versions of metropolitan companies, and, at the second level, extend mentoring, incubation and executive education to these local enterprises to enhance their position in leadership capability.

Migration will continue, and it should. India’s leading cities remain important laboratories of talent, capital and exposure. The goal is not to persuade every ambitious young person to stay home. It is to make movement more circular: study in a metro, work there, build networks, then collaborate with or return to a smaller city without being treated as professionally diminished.

India’s leadership pipeline is becoming geographically wider as aspiration meets infrastructure in more places. The next great founder may still arrive in Bengaluru to raise capital. But the habits that make her formidable—frugality, patience, local knowledge and the nerve to build without permission—may have been formed far from it.

The important change is not that small towns have suddenly acquired ambition. The ambition was always there. What is changing is the distance between ambition and opportunity—and that may eventually redraw India’s map of leadership.

The author is Director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Indore.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.