Dhruva CEO explains how India’s game industry is coming of age (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
March 30, 2014
Updated June 18, 2025
10 min

Rajesh Rao was ahead of his time when he started Dhruva Interactive in 1997. And he has grown the Bangalore-based company to be the biggest game company in India over the past 17 years. Dhruva now has 320 employees, and Rao has become a leader for the game economy in South Asia.

India is a technology giant with billion-dollar companies like TCS, Wipro, and HCL. But it hasn’t had much of a home-grown game industry. Rao’s quest will test whether emerging countries can grow their own game industry, even in the absence of a history of hardcore gaming culture.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.