1996McDonald's and KFC arrive in the same year. India decided food was either street food you could not trust or the standardised American version, and thirty years later the trade has been remade by Indian companies that took the practice and kept the local sense of it. Patankar expects the event business to go the same way, in ten years rather than thirty.
Jan 2000His first event, on the 3rd. The Indian Science Congress exhibition in Pune, with all the financial risk on him and another agency's execution borrowed. Kargil in 1999 had left him a month of runway, and Y2K had just sent a wave of Indians home from America.
2016Ratan Tata comes to the Bangalore Tech Summit. He was there first thing on the opening morning, and Anil Ambani came the same year.
2017Three shows merge into one. Bangalore IT.com had become ITBiz, running alongside Bangalore Bio and a nanotech show that Patankar curated. The argument that year was that the domains were integrating and the cross-fertilisation was the point, so holding bio in one place and nanotech in another had stopped making sense.
2021Semicon lands in Bangalore, before the industry does. A decade earlier any semiconductor leader asked about India would say the ecosystem and the talent were not ready. The first Indian edition put global chip heads, policymakers and industry bodies in the same room.
2022The global heads come back, and then Delhi. A second edition in 2022 and the latest one in Delhi. Four years on, states compete for semiconductor investment and money has followed the attention.
TodaySixty per cent unorganised, and 56 cities to cover. Most of the trade is micro vendors outside GST, German firms already run India's largest industry shows and Americans are asking. The 27th Bengaluru Tech Summit goes to Bangalore Palace, and Patankar has taken on a government-built Mumbai convention centre to experiment in. A ₹1 lakh booth is really ₹10 lakh of exhibitor spend, and a ₹100 crore event moves ₹1 lakh crore of business.
