Digital City Festival on tour in India Day 1: Meeting in Mumbai with Andy Burnham and fellow tech delegates

Day One: Mumbai

Anyone who has travelled from Manchester to India expects a long journey, lots of waiting in queues at passport control, a hectic and nerve-jangling taxi ride, before finally arriving at the hotel. They’re not wrong! It’s all fine though, the big hotel bed was a welcome relief. 

After four hours of sleep, I woke and went down to the restaurant to have my first breakfast in India. Curry! Of course it’s curry – what was I expecting? Anyway, I digress.

Today I am in Mumbai, India’s largest city, it’s financial capital and, according to the World Economic Forum and KPMG, a hotbed for startups. We have already enjoyed the hospitality of the global services giant Deloitte who put on a welcome reception. They also are keen advocates of closer ties between Indian and UK businesses.

I am meeting senior representatives of leading local Indian tech companies as part of a series of roundtable events, plus a ‘Manchester comes to Mumbai’ networking event hosted by Andy Burnham and Deputy High Commissioner Crispin Simon. Crispin is also the HM Trade Commissioner for South Asia – his job is to coordinate the government’s effort overseas to promote UK trade and prosperity.

Fellow tech delegates on this visit also include business luminaries such as Jon Corner, Chief Digital Officer, City of Salford and Chief Executive Officer, The Landing; Prabhu Prakesh Ganesh, Chief Technology Officer, MiQ; Ashish Pandey, Vice President and Client Executive UK, Tech Mahindra; Kaushik Sindhu, Associate Vice-President, 42Gears Mobility Systems; Esha Singh, General Manager Emerging Markets & Internationalisation, The Hut Group; Tim Newns, Chief Executive of MIDAS; Ashank Desai, Founder of Mastek Ltd; and Tom Mottershead, Deputy Director of Trade India at Department for International Trade – many of these I presented with at the tech roundtable this morning.

We’ve had a great reception so far and people are clearly very interested in Digital City Festival – I’ve already given out loads of invites! That’s all I have time for, but I will be back tomorrow with more!

Martyn’s day two diary entry will be posted on Prolific North tomorrow.

Find out how you can get involved with DCF on the official website.