India’s a hot country. It has two seasons: the hot & wet season and the hot & dry season. Hot countries, despite what every English person might argue, can be uncomfortable places to be. Especially when they’re hot and wet – hot and wet creates all kinds of problems, not least of which is the ‘I’m so hot I can’t even think’ problem.

But in 1902 a gentleman called Willis Carrier invented air conditioning, which pleased people who lived in India because it made hot, wet air into dry, cool air. Decades later, and with that little kick provided by the internet getting invented, it also meant that the Indian tech industry could flourish since offices full of computers became spaces that could be inhabited by human beings as opposed to ovens suited mainly to the sorts of extremophiles one can observe grazing on the sides of deep-sea volcanic vents.

It’s still flourishing today with much of the IT support and development work sought by UK companies being undertaken in India. But there’s been a wave of Indian start-ups over the past few years that has caught the attention of investors, most recently Taiwanese company Foxconn Group (a major assembler of Apple’s products) that joined tech sector peers Alibaba and Uber, two well-known names already doing things in India, aiming to invest $1bn in the country’s start-ups over the next two years.

China has rattled the markets of late. Might the wary and the weary of the investing community be eyeing India as an alternative emerging market, hopeful that PM Narendra Modi will act to make doing business there a hell of a lot more straightforward? With infrastructure still a major concern for Foxconn, it does look as if would be investors are betting on improvements being made.

Interestingly, the UK is currently leading the G20 for investment in India and the fact that the World Bank and IMF appear to have said that India’s growth will overtake that of a stalling China by 2017, making it the world’s fastest growing economy, means investors fleeing from China should probably stop off in India for a look around on the way home. A quick perusal of  the start-up website AngelList throws up a plethora of plucky little start-ups – everything from online dating through amazon-style online shopping, self-drive car rentals (that’s a first for India…), social media, marketing tools and online food delivery services (InnerChef’s offerings in particular being of distinctly European style).

The great thing is that these are ideas that have already worked in the developed world, and so one might conclude the risks are lower. I think there is considerable growth potential in these start-ups in the near future, and what’s more once the big players in the west feel that the time is right to move (back?) into emerging markets, they’ll be ripe for M&A.

So if China is rattling your cage and UK, European and US equities are too expensive (or too boring), then maybe India could present the next round of opportunity.