Snapdeal's Bansal Reacts to Criticism; Says India Has Some of the Smartest Engineers

Following criticism by rival Flipkart over comments on lack of quality engineers in the country, Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal clarified that while India has some of the "smartest engineers on the planet", other geographies have built out far more at-scale products.

Yesterday, Flipkart co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal had taken a dig at Snapdeal for saying India should not be blamed for the latter's failure to hire "great engineers".

Sachin Bansal's tweet came against the backdrop of a report where Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal was quoted as saying, "If you think about the landscape in India, not too many product companies got built here".

After Twitter was abuzz with discussions on the spat between the two homegrown e-commerce majors, Rohit Bansal posted his response on the company blog last night.

He indicated that he was misquoted in the report and that it "hurts when people do that as a way to get headlines for themselves".

Rohit Bansal said India, being the engineering centre for the world, has "some of the smartest engineers on the planet" but at the same time, the Internet industry in India has been very small until recently and hence the building of at-scale technology products out of India is a more recent phenomenon.

"In many other geographies around the world, the market has been much larger for a while and hence far more at scale products have been built out here," Rohit Bansal said.

He added that while Snapdeal will continue to build the largest technology platform for India, "in parallel, we feel it is the right thing to do to bring on board some select folks from around the world who have had the experience of building technology at scale."

Over the last few months, there have been many instances where a top executive of successful technology enterprise has taken to the social media to express opinion against a rival.

Sachin Bansal had tweeted in support of the controversial 'Airtel Zero' plan. However, the e-retailer backed out from being part of the plan as it had found the telecom firm's marketing platform to be violating the principle of net neutrality after further study.

On the other hand, Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal had tweeted against the platform saying: "Couldn't have built Zomato if we had a competitor on something like Airtel Zero."

Last week, Housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav took on Zomato and Ola Cabs through Twitter, challenging them to give away half their stake to employees.