F8: Grow India, Grow Cardano

As well as Africa, I think we should also put significant focus on Cardano within India.

India has a massive population of 1.4 billion.

55% are under the age of 30yrs (Wikipedia, 2016 est.)

There are a significant percentage of unbanked/rural people

worldpoverty.io notes 100 million Indians (7%) live in extreme poverty

Certain rural areas are already using Aadhaar Pay to pay for goods using their fingerprint (see https://www.payaadhar.in)

More affluent areas are early adopters of new technologies and India has a lot of skilled IT people

Jio telecoms (3rd largest in the world) has 405 million mobile subscribers (Wikipedia, 2019). So there is enough infrastructure and consumer devices in place to make this a serious market right away.

Having an India focused Catalyst challenge/fund would be very useful to gather teams and ideas and get the Cardano ball rolling in India.

I am not Indian and have no connection to India, but I think that Cardano could be useful to help solve issues that they face and also to grow the Cardano eco-system.

On the surface issues in India might appear similar to Africa or South America, and there will be some overlap, but ideally local people identifying and solving local issues is best.

Emurgo has an office in India, but not sure what they are up to.

IT in India is well established with a large pool of talent and skills available - we need to let them know about Cardano and the Catalyst funding.

This proposal is intended to focus on India within a Fund8 challenge, with that challenge attracting actionable proposals to grow the community of developers and educators.

Some suggestions for that Fund8 challenge are:

• Setting up local Cardano hubs for regular catch ups (virtual or real world)
• Local-language websites/socials/YT set up to attract developers/entrepreneurs to explain Cardano and Catalyst at a high-level
• Fund a dapp and create a how-to video in local-language as a walk through to help educate and reduce perceived complexity
• Run a competition/pitch-fest for dapp ideas with the top 10 ideas get funded to make a MVP
• Connect with universities and training centers
• Connect with new and established Indian YouTube channels to talk Cardano tech, dev ideas, business opportunities etc to create a buzz about Catalyst funding
• Regularly promote awareness of Cardano and Catalyst funding to bring people into the space eg a 12 month campaign

This is like a big heavy wheel that will take a lot of energy to get turning, but once it starts to move it will (hopefully) keep going with less energy needed.

How much ADA/USD should be available for this proposal?

I think it will take a few Catalyst rounds to build the Cardano interest in India, so the first round of investment during Fund8 should be $150k. Subsequent funding rounds can be determined at the time and then voted on by the community.

Why is it important?

1.4B people. 55% under 30y (2016 est)

Local Cardano developers/businesses needed to solve local issues.

Significant poverty/unbanked

What does success look like?

Success is having multiple submissions for Catalyst Fund8 for India focused projects, with real-world projects getting funded and built.

Key Metrics to measure

The overall key metrics would be:

• Increased interaction between Catalyst and Indian focused projects
• Number of Indian focused Catalyst submissions
• Number of Indian focused dapps/services actually built