India’s deputy IT minister said the nation’s tech startups had deposits totaling roughly $1 billion in the embattled Silicon Valley Bank, as he urged local banks to lend more to the Indian startup community to keep their businesses advancing.

On March 10th, following a run on the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, California banking regulators shuttered the bank and took control of its deposits. As of the end of 2022 the bank had held $209 billion in assets.

Within a single day, depositors had managed to pull as much as $42 billion, creating liquidity issues and forcing it to seek out investors. Alarmed at the state of the bank, regulators swooped in and took it over to ensure depositors would have access to all of their funds.

In a late-night Twitter spaces chat, Rajeev Chandrashekhar, India’s state minister for technology said, “The issue is, how do we make startups transition to the Indian banking system, rather than depend on the complex cross border U.S. banking system with all of its uncertainties in the coming month?”

Chandrashekhar said that by his estimates, hundreds of Indian startups had over a billion dollars of their funds tied up at the failed lender.

He noted that he had met more than 460 stakeholders in the course of the week, including startups which were hit by SVB’s closing, and he had relayed their recommendations to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

Chandrashekhar said one of the suggestions he had passed on to the Finance minister was that local banks extend deposit-backed lines of credit to affected startups which had their funds tied up at SVB, using their SVB deposits as collateral.

India’s startup market is among the world’s largest, filled with startups with multi-billion-dollar valuations backed by foreign investors with big visons in the digital tech-space, and other areas.