In the early 1990s, while Dell was sniffing around in a leafy, laidback city in Karnataka named Bangalore, a news item by John Ward Anderson appeared in the Washington Post. Among the best journalists in the newspaper, John and his wife Molly were a delightful couple. John was introduced to the present writer, then Resident Editor of the Times of India at Bangalore, by Udayant Malhoutra, who is as dynamic as the company he runs, Dynamatic, a high tech enterprise which builds aeroplane parts for Airbus and Boeing.
By that time, it was clear to the ToI Resident Editor that Bangalore was special. It seemed laidback, but underneath such an exterior, buzzed with creative people. After being taken around the city, complete with leafy lanes and beautiful cottages, John was convinced as well. He wrote a front page report for the Washington Post about a charming city with sophisticated elders, quaint streets, bungalows and creative young minds that was poised to emerge as a competitor to Silicon Valley. The intrepid founders of Wipro and Infosys, Azim Premji and Narayanmurthy, may not be aware that it was that front page story in the Washington Post, still a highly reputed publication at the time, that launched their companies into the Big League.
Once 1999 stumbled into the world, Infosys and Wipro were at the centre of ensuring that digital chaos did not follow. Under Chandrababu Naidu, Hyderabad became Cyberabad, and Chennai prospered in the glow of success which enveloped the South. Now the moment has arrived for a new revolution, this time around not reaching out towards the middle ends of the spectrum but at the peak. After all, it is Indian talent which is at the cutting edge of technological innovation in the US and increasingly in other corners of the world. Countries such as Germany which once reverberated to the slogan of “Kinder, nicht Inder” (Children, not Indians) have laid the welcome mat for high-skilled citizens of India. Indeed, education in Germany is free, and subsidies are many, which is why more and more young Indians are skipping once favoured destinations such as Canada or the UK to go to Germany for studies and subsequently, for work. Rather than gripe about “Brain Drain” to foreign shores, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced innovative schemes to attract talent and has done away with such bureaucratic errors as Angel Tax on investors. He is in the process of creating a regulatory system that attracts rather than drives away investment. A few senior bureaucrats remain whose minds are steeped in the “private sector is evil” and “government must have control” mindset of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi eras, a mindset still welded to the governance concepts of the Soviet Union. The civil services need to ensure horizontal entry to domain specialists, and expectations are that such a course will soon be resumed. Rather than serve as back offices of the digital age, companies in India need to develop into world beaters where technology is concerned. In such a path lies the future of India.
MDN