Zoho CEO says money and infra alone won't help India solve its problems, need better design

Zoho CEO Mani Vembu says India's challenges cannot be solved by simply spending more money on infrastructure, but require smarter planning and better design. His comments came after discussing urban flooding, public transport and the need to work with natural systems.

In Short

• Zoho CEO says bigger infrastructure alone cannot fix India’s problems
• He calls for better city design, public transport and flood planning
• Zoho expands India-made tech push with Nathu La server platform

Zoho CEO Mani Vembu has argued that India’s biggest challenges cannot be solved simply by spending more money on infrastructure. According to him, better planning and smarter design decisions are often more important than building bigger projects.

Vembu shared his views on social media while responding to a post by an X user that included a video showing severe flooding in Beijing, China, after a few hours of intense rainfall. The video showed how even major cities with advanced infrastructure can struggle when urban planning does not account for natural challenges.

"What’s the lesson from this?” Vembu wrote. “Heavy rain can't be avoided. All we can do is decide where the water should go. Our homes? Our roads? Or places designed to hold excess water?"

The Zoho CEO explained that cities need to be designed around how natural systems work instead of only expanding concrete infrastructure. He pointed out that public transport can be a more efficient solution for a country like India compared to continuously increasing road networks designed around private vehicles.

“For a country like India, public transport scales far better than road infrastructure built around private cars,” Vembu said. He added that better transport planning can also leave more space for trees, parks, water bodies and flood management systems.

His comments come at a time when Indian cities are rapidly expanding, with governments investing heavily in roads, highways, smart cities and urban development projects. However, frequent flooding in several cities during monsoon seasons has raised questions about drainage systems, land use planning and the impact of unchecked construction.

“Throwing more money at every problem won't solve it,” Vembu said. “Some problems can be solved by better design than bigger infrastructure.”

Zoho’s focus on building technology from India

Vembu’s comments on design come as Zoho itself has been focusing on building technology infrastructure within India. The Chennai-based enterprise software company recently introduced its first locally designed server, called Nathu La, entering the data hardware space.

The server has been designed entirely by Zoho’s engineering teams and is powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors. The company claims that data centres using Nathu La servers can deliver similar performance while consuming 12-18 per cent less power and reducing total cost of ownership by 20-30 per cent.

Zoho said the server was created as part of its larger effort to own more layers of its technology stack, from software and platforms to hardware infrastructure.

“With Zoho’s strategy of using contextual, right-sized models, running on our own platform, now on our own servers, accelerated by our own GPU database, we are compounding the benefits accrued from owning and operating our entire technology stack,” Shailesh Davey, CEO of Zoho Corp., said.

The company said Nathu La has been developed with applications such as artificial intelligence workloads, high-performance computing, virtualisation and storage in mind. Zoho has also designed several components internally, including the server management module and network interface systems.

The company has filed five patents related to server architecture and thermal management. It also said the platform follows open computing standards and has been developed with a focus on energy efficiency and easier maintenance.

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