Starting a business is no longer something Indian students are leaving for life after college. More than one in five college students in the country have already started a venture, while 43 per cent say they want to become entrepreneurs, according to a national survey released by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi.

The GUESSS India 2025 National Survey Report, conducted in partnership with REVA University, Bengaluru, surveyed 25,783 students from more than 1,200 higher education institutions across 34 states and union territories.

It found that 22 per cent of Indian students had already started a business, almost matching the global average of 23 per cent. Among those who had taken the plunge, 35.5 per cent were already generating regular sales, slightly higher than the global figure of 33 per cent.

The findings also suggest a gradual change in what students want to do after graduation.

In 2023, 14 per cent of students wanted to start their own business immediately after completing their studies. By 2025, that figure had risen to 16.2 per cent.

Over the same period, interest in government jobs fell from 12.7 per cent to 10.1 per cent, while the share of students hoping to join a large company declined from 31.3 per cent to 27.4 per cent.

The report also found that Indian student entrepreneurs are starting businesses relatively quickly. Nearly 31 per cent of student businesses generating regular sales were established in 2025 alone, compared with 18 per cent globally.

Not every attempt succeeds, however. About 41 per cent of Indian student founders had previously closed a business before starting another, compared with 33 per cent worldwide. Another 42 per cent were running two or more businesses, well above the global average of 25 per cent.

Dr Puran Singh, Associate Professor at the School of Management, IIT Mandi, and Country Delegate for GUESSS India, said students were increasingly moving beyond business ideas to building ventures that generate revenue and employment.

“India’s students are as ambitious as any in the world, and those who start are building real businesses that already hire people,” said Singh, who led the report.

He said entrepreneurship courses, dedicated programmes and campus incubators were helping students, but universities needed to pay greater attention to how many aspiring entrepreneurs actually launched businesses.

“The opportunity now is to put more founders in students’ lives and help them take a real first step early. Then we count how many students move from ambition to action; not just how many talk about creating a startup,” he said.

One of the more striking findings concerns the influence of people students know.

Those who have entrepreneurs among their relatives, friends, classmates or teachers are three times more likely to start a venture.

Yet half of Indian students said they did not know an entrepreneur outside their parents. Globally, the corresponding figure was about one in three.

This suggests that while many students are interested in entrepreneurship, they may have limited opportunities to meet people who have actually built businesses.

The survey also found a gap between the businesses students hope to establish and those already operating. Information technology, artificial intelligence and digital services were the most common areas of interest among aspiring founders. But only about one in ten existing student-run businesses was digital.

Getting the first customer remains another challenge.

Among students still developing their ventures, only 10 per cent had made their first sale, compared with 23 per cent globally.

The report also points to differences between men and women in turning entrepreneurial plans into businesses. Although women expressed an interest in starting ventures almost as frequently as men, 45 per cent of aspiring women founders had started a business, compared with 53 per cent of men.

Dr P. Shyama Raju, Chancellor of REVA University, said universities needed to look beyond preparing students for conventional employment.

“A university’s task is no longer only to educate students for jobs. It is to educate them for enterprise, so that they create the jobs,” he said.

Prof Anjan Swain, Chair of the School of Management at IIT Mandi, said the institution would use the survey findings to shape its entrepreneurship programmes.

“Student entrepreneurship is central to how the School of Management thinks about management education: we want our students to build ventures and organisations, not only to manage them,” he said.

Rather than focusing only on startup competitions and business plans, the report recommends that universities encourage students to take practical steps such as developing prototypes, registering businesses and finding their first customers.

It also calls for greater interaction with alumni entrepreneurs, faculty members who have founded businesses and students already running ventures.

Another recommendation is to measure how many students move from wanting to start a business to actually doing so. According to the report, 51 out of every 100 students who want to become entrepreneurs have taken that step.

Prof Shyam Kumar Masakapalli, Dean of Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy at IIT Mandi, said entrepreneurship was about creating solutions and opportunities, adding that the institute wanted students to identify opportunities and act on them.

The report, titled How Do We Make Student Entrepreneurs?, was released on October 9 at ISBACON 2026 in Mohali. It was authored by Dr Puran Singh and Prerak Sharma, with the survey conducted between September and December 2025.

GUESSS India is part of the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey, an international research initiative that began in 2003 at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. The 2025 global survey covered 66 countries.

The findings leave universities with a practical question: with so many students interested in starting businesses, how can campuses help more of them find their first customer and keep their ventures running?