New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- Ask an average Indian to name a startup and you will probably get a food delivery app, a payments app, or a cab. Ask them to name a company working on railway track inspection, and you will get silence.

That silence is not a gap in activity. It is a gap in attention.

India has well over a lakh startups formally recognised by the government, and a large share of them are not building anything you would download. They are building cold storage boxes, diagnostic software, sensor systems, and assistive devices. Work that shows up in a district hospital or a mandi or a railway maintenance shed, and seldom on a feed.

There is a reason for that. A consumer app demos itself in fifteen seconds on a phone screen. A predict...