Patankar's claim is that India treats events as decoration when they are actually economic infrastructure. Walk into an American city, he says, and the convention centre sits at the middle with the business district, downtown and suburbs arranged around it; roughly 6% of a German city's economy comes from event-related business, and every event that lands lifts five or six sectors at once — hotels, transport, entertainment, dining, tourism. India woke up late, and still builds halls without the roads, hotels and finishing around them. His proof that the order can be reversed is Semicon: a decade ago chip executives said the Indian ecosystem was not ready, then the first Indian edition landed in Bangalore in 2021, put global heads in front of policymakers, and now states compete for the industry. The trade that hosts all this is itself roughly 60% unorganised, but he expects it to consolidate the way food service did after McDonald's and KFC arrived in 1996 — in ten years rather than thirty, with Indian companies absorbing global practice and staying glocal. Underneath sits an operator's ethic learned at India Today, where three lakh printed copies were scrapped overnight to rewrite a cover story: deliver the value first, take the money after. A booth sold at ₹1 lakh represents ₹10 lakh of the exhibitor's real spend, and a ₹100 crore event carries some ₹1,000 crore of participant investment while moving ₹1 lakh crore of business — which is why he now wants to incubate the industry rather than merely run events inside it.
Worth your time if you are
Exhibition and conference operators sizing up India
City and state officials drafting an events policy
Founders weighing whether a trade booth is worth ₹10 lakh
Long-game entrepreneurs who build through collaboration
