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These
are times of great change and evolution in the Indian Technological
and Economic scenario. It's not the India of the early nineties;
the last decade has seen changes in the country's economic thinking
which have had far reaching consequences. One sector of Indian
industry which has unmistakably benefited from the changed outlook
is the Indian IT industry. Recently, in the news was the acquisition
of Daksh (a huge Call Centre in Gurgaon) by IBM for a staggering
$170 million(Rs. 850 cr). Now this only goes to show how concerned
the big international tech. houses are with their local competitors
in India. But there is a flip side to the rosy picture that the
press and media have been painting about the IT sector. Call me
a pessimist, or an old fashioned pensioner, but the BPO boom,
as much it grabs our attention, is not the stuff of which great
nations are built.
India today suffers from the problem of plenty. This may sound
contradictory; one is tempted to ask how can living in plenty
be a problem. The fact is, when choices are available in plenty,
one invariably picks the path of least resistance. One can end
up making a lot of money in setting up Call Centres, or by taking
up maintenance/testing works of software "work-houses" of North
America/Europe. But here is where the problem lies. Entrepreneurs
and industrialists today are foraying into non-sustainable games
- they are non-sustainable since the experienced gained cannot
be leveraged into moving up the value chain.
Today
India is basking in the glory of being under the British Raj for
200 years. I ask, how long will it take the Chinese to learn English?
How long before low cost nations like Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc.
bid a lesser amount for the same services? An entire generation
of the nations young that have spent their best & most productive
years in a Call Centre or in writing thousands of lines of code
for God only knows what, will be suddenly thrown out of their
jobs. 10-15 years down the line, this could well be the reality
(God Forbid!).
This is a time of great change for India. Our freedom of choice,
if exercised loosely has the power to debilitate us. This is the
best time to choose the path of invention and innovation. A nation
derives its economic prosperity largely from its natural and man-made
resources, human capital and enterprises. Our survival depends
on how far up the value chain we are able to reach. It's a matter
of evolution. Darwin has said, "It is not the strongest of species
who survive nor the most intelligent but the most responsive to
change". We have to realize the times are changing, and we have
to keep pace. We must spend more on industrial research and development
rather than debugging code for some US client. We have to develop
technology which the world would buy from us, rather than we having
to buy that technology from the US.
One of my more erudite friends asked me, "You speak so high of
R&D, would you join DRDO or TCS when either comes for campus recruitment?"
Well, my answer to it is, of course I would join TCS. As I have
said before, India today suffer from the problem of plenty and
when this happens, one does choose the easiest path. But my question
is, why isn't there a company like TCS RESEARCH or may be INFOSYS
RESEARCH or WIPRO RESEARCH (on the lines of MICROSOFT RESEARCH)
which is more into indigenously developing world-class products,
catering to the world at large. Saying that heydays of BPO/IT
sector are over is like saying that the days of the "Female Child"
are over, but the bottom line is, we need more entrepreneurs,
more industrialists investing in R&D rather than taking the shorter
route of testing, debugging or maintaining software for the "whiteman".
The iron is hot, and we can either beat it into the shape we like
or get cauterized by it. The choice at the end of the day, ladies
and gentlemen, is ours!
I want to conclude with this famous Urdu couplet:
"Na
Samjho ge to mit jaoge, e-Hindustaan waalon…. Daastan tak na rahegi
tumhari Daastano mein"
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