the minimum extent required they say they do not trust the indian government and the legal systemso the ownership of the startup the intellectual property and data all shift overseas however the other operations continue as before they build their product in india as before using indian manpower they sell to customers in india as before he saidthe investors he said want access to indian market and customers but not the indian government regulators or tax authoritiesif there are some rules that you feel should be changed you should be in a conversation with the government rather than doing this he saidif this happens on a massive scale you end up with a situation where the company the investors the value capture the ip and the data are all domiciled overseas with little accountability to indian regulators whereas the customers the workforce the development of ip and the capture of data are all in indiathis bikchandani says is an institutionalized mechanism for transferring wealth out of india on a very large scaleasked how many indian startups would have changed domicile in the last few years he said there is no comprehensive enumeration but he would estimate that between 500 to 1000 startups have flipped overseas in the last five to seven yearsconsidering 500 of indias best startups shifted overseas and 2 per cent of those become as successful as naukri and half of 1 per cent become as successful as infosys there is a loss of over rs 17 lakh crore of market cap to the nation at current pricesthese companies will operate in india and access the market however they will not be indian companies he said a domicile shift and transfer of ip and data to an overseas company is a permanent loss and as a company grows so does this lossstating that the government is the best custodian of national interest bikhchandani said the policy has to comprise a package of both incentives and disincentives to encourage certain types of behaviour and discourage other typesand possibly enforce an outright ban on certain other constructs he said adding that the government should insist that data and the ip should belong to the indian subsidiary and cannot be owned by the overseas entity in sensitive sectors like fintechthis could be done retrospectively he said