Ta Nathanswamy, CEO of Mahindra, told Business Standard that the company was planning to start a venture capital fund. When Iain Thomson, who is the executive vice-president of Tata Sons, said on the phone, “Tata’s already set up an accelerator for early-stage companies,” I asked how long it would take. In the meantime, I looked for an Indian equivalent of the Model S accelerator, and found one that had just opened.

“What is your philosophy about this world?” I asked.

“We’ve set different guidelines on what kind of companies get created,” he replied.

“How big a part of the ecosystem does this take?”

“We have a very healthy ecosystem. We have an ecosystem driven by startups, that is run by Tata’s employees, with some of us who come from outside the organisation and some other people who come from inside.”

Iain Thomson

My mind went back to my first phone call with Kumar Vilya, the Tata chief operating officer, in 2011. He was trying to get a start on a new way of promoting start-ups. In the end, though, Tata, at the time, wasn’t the engine behind the accelerator. I suggested to Iain Thomson’s successor, Rahul Narayan, that the accelerator might be another driver—another piece of evidence that the Tata Group was getting serious about startups in India. “I think so,” he replied.

Vilya, who has since been promoted to CEO, was an admirer of the accelerator, too, and had helped a young engineer from Tata’s Advanced Technologies Research Institute create a company called Arcanum, or “A-Tech,” as it’s known, to study and accelerate startups while also offering mentorships. He had even thought of launching his own incubator in partnership with Tata—an institution that his predecessor, Vidyasagar Rao, had seen as too small and too expensive.

One day, Kumar Vilya pulled me aside at a company meeting in Mumbai to ask about my plans. He described Arcanum as a “start-up incubator,” so much so that we decided to create a separate section at the magazine to talk about it. (A-Tech, Iain told Narayan, will launch in Mumbai soon, in partnership with a company called Start-up India.) “What we’re doing is very similar to what you did