Emergence of India as knowledge superpower: some issues

AS WE enter the new millennium, we find that several significant changes have taken place in the recent past, both nationally and globally. This has occurred in a wide spectrum of sectors, covering economy, commerce, education, R & D, industry, society, and the Government. A major transformation in the mindset has set in and the concepts of globalisation, liberalisation, privatisation, business-driven R & D, quality-driven manufacture, and IT-driven commerce and services have taken root.

The knowledge and information revolutions have impacted everyone, in every-day life and work; the impact is expected to be even more ubiquitous in the coming years. Countries have been shaping their policies to respond to the challenges and opportunities. Fortune 500 lists are being re-written to reflect the substitution of brick and mortar assets by knowledge assets. A number of new terms are being added to vocabulary, such as knowledge society, knowledge economy, knowledge industry, knowledge workers, knowledge officers, knowledge management, and intellectual capital. However, India's brush with IT has only been marginal as exemplified by the relative insensitivity to the Y2K bug.

Changes in lifestyles

Let us consider a few examples of how our lifestyles, workstyles and leisure activities have been transformed by the information revolution.

Education: Distance education, particularly for adult learners and for continuing education, has the potential to obviate the need for classrooms and teachers and universal access to educational resources over the net introduce questions of admission barriers, assessment and certification.

Work: Video-conferencing has the potential to eliminate business travel; computers have made draughtsmen and typists unnecessary; the glamour and attractive salaries of IT jobs are turning young graduates away from non-IT sectors; full-time work and employment are receding; tele-working and virtual offices are becoming the order of the day; frequent re-education, re-training and re- skilling are becoming necessary.

Communication: Cell phones have removed the constraint of having to seek a phone booth and e-mail may make conventional postal service obsolete.

Commerce: ATMs permit us to withdraw money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; plastic money obviates the need to carry cash, nor to buy against cash payment and forex credit cards enable foreign exchange transactions without having to use foreign currency.

Travel: Railway and air tickets can be booked anywhere in the country for travel anywhere in the country.

Entertainment: TV and videos have de-emphasised the appeal of cinema halls.

There are two types of significant features of a knowledge society. Existing features which have been labelled with a knowledge tag: examples include travel and tourism, banking, education, R & D, and news media; new and emerging areas: examples include teleshopping, e-commerce, distance education, and web-based learning.

Some of the prerequisites for the realisation of knowledge society are: good telecom infrastructure; PC penetration and skills; education and training facilities; literacy - basic, fundamental, scientific, technological and computer; reliable and stable electric power supply; conducive government policy regime and empowerment of people, allowing them to realise their potential.

Harlan Cleveland, former President of the University of Hawai, points out that the `information environment' is changing our thinking about globalisation, diversity, community, the world economy, the rich-poor gap, and education. Of the 10 transformations he has identified as going on all at once, all relating to the global spread of knowledge, two have specifically to do with IT:

Computers: Serving as prosthetic extensions of our brain-power, are replacing much of the repetitious drudgery people have always had to endure and have brought in their own new puzzles about the future of `work'.

Linkage and simulation: Linking fast computers with more reliable telecom enables us to model and simulate vast complex systems such as the global atmosphere, the human genome and nuclear fall- out from megaton explosions.

He also points out that a skill revolution is taking place as a result of the widening spread of knowledge as also a fundamental knowledge in the technology of organisations. Pyramids and command-and-control are on their way out, while consultation and consensus are increasingly in. He identifies the `information revolution' to refer to the sudden spread of knowledge. The marriage of computers to electronic communications in the Eighties has touched off an eruption of change that affects everybody and everything, ranging from political forces to business, profession, intellectual discipline, settled theory, organised religion and traditional culture.

Information is so different from all its predecessors as civilization's dominant resource, because information is symbols, not things. The essence of this difference is that information is more accessible than the world's dominant resources have ever been before.

Cleveland has listed six propositions about information: (i) information is not necessarily depletive; it expands as it is used; (ii) it is readily transportable at close to the speed of light; (iii) information leaks so easily that it is much harder to hide and to hoard than tangible resources; (iv) the spread of knowledge empowers the many, simply by eroding the influence that once empowered the few who were in the know; (v) information cannot be owned, though its delivery service can and (vi) giving or selling information is not an exchange transaction, it is a sharing transaction.

Both in India and abroad, the Indian IT-entrepreneurs and the knowledge workers have achieved phenomenal success. What are the critical success factors? There has been much speculation; much less serious study.

As a result of the interviews with successful Indian IT- entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, the following opinions have emerged:

* Qualities peculiarly Indian that have helped in his success (Vinod Khosla): work ethic, low expectation of quick results, getting used to working with very little in the way of resources.

* Indians abroad do well because of the environment, which is nourishing, role-model-rich and facilitative.

* The U.S. ambience truly allows people to be all they can be - it allows one to realise his potential.

* Qualities vital for the successful entrepreneur of tomorrow are: continuous education; access to the environment on the net; creativity, combined with a strong overview of technology; understanding that technology is key, independent of which business you are in - computers or groceries and most strategies will be driven by technology.

* On the possibility of replicating the Silicon Valley, which appears to represent a natural ecosystem, generating ideas, entrepreneurs and wealth. It is hard to do, but can be done. We must start by tapping into the infrastructure in Silicon Valley. Net access and a cheap telecom infrastructure are the first things one must do. Compared to education and direct investment, telecom infrastructure will impact all businesses positively by enabling Indian entrepreneurs to access the outside world. It unleashes the power of the motivated.

The population of any country, more so ours, has a heterogeneous character, in terms of standard of living, income, access to infrastructural facilities, and educational attainments and in the context of the present discussion, need for and ability to exploit IT infrastructure. In fact, one of the features of industrialised countries is the narrowing of the disparities among the population; for example, the rural areas are as well endowed with communication, travel and infrastructure as the urban ones. In the context of India, there is a wide gap between the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the information haves and the have-nots, and the rural and the urban.

The New Indian Express (January 27) editorialises that the first city of the real Internet revolution is neither Cyberabad nor Bangalore, but a dot on the map of M.P. called Dehrisarai. It is pointed out that ``it is absurd to even posit information superpower status in a country where majority of people have no access to information. In fact, they do not even have access to the alphabet, the carrier for almost all information in our culture. In the absence of a body of people who can actually use IT without the need for constant mediation and hand-holding, there can be no question of an IT revolution in the country. It will be scuppered by a human resource problem, not a technology problem". In the M.P. example, people have been empowered with information on the regular market updates, and access to government documents and resources, through the Internet, thus cutting out middlemen, and freeing them from the trader community. Mass empowerment, it is pointed out, can come only from mass education.

In India, we have witnessed the penetration of telecom infrastructure to all parts of the country. Soon, this will also be true of IT infrastructure. In order, for the people, to exploit these resources, it is necessary to build up their capacity for utilising these resources and that is through education.

The World Bank's Human Development Report warns that the net could foster greater inequalities between information haves and have-nots, with proficiency in English a key divider, and a hegemony of rich nations, especially the U.S., over the knowledge delivery system. Vinod Khosia agrees with more dichotomy, but feels it will not be along the lines of the rich and the poor, but will be based on motivated and unmotivated people. Participants in the information economy will have bigger opportunities. He would rather enable people, independent of background, than force equality. The best thing the world has going is motivation and initiative. We must give people the tools to reach their potential and let them determine their fate. While English would be the dominant language, this is no cause for worry. Regionalism is a bad idea, fostering division, conflict, pettiness and disrespect for others. Maybe, we should all be just world citizens. While this is fairly unlikely in the next 100 years, technology will force us in that direction.

Prime Minister's 5-point agenda

At the recent annual Assocham summit, the Prime Minister enunciated a five-point agenda for ``The Emergence of India as a Knowledge Superpower". He identified five areas / issues on which attention should be focussed. They are:

* Leveraging of existing competencies in IT, telecom, biotechnology, drug design, financial services and enterprise- wise management. All of these comprise the creation and application of knowledge.

* Global networking. Sankhyavahini, the national project for international networking, has been approved by the Cabinet and it is hoped that it will become functional soon. It will give an enormous bandwidth and a window to the outside world.

* Education for developing a learning society. It has several ramifications, starting from literacy, all the way up to the high end of the spectrum.

* Vibrant Government-industry-academia interaction in policy- making and implementation. Our institute has been a pioneer in promoting industry-institute interaction, and our contributions to the national strategic areas of Space, atomic energy, and defence have been duly acknowledged in many fora.

* Economic and business strategic alliances built on capabilities and opportunities.

We have a dream of becoming the knowledge superpower in the new millennium. There are several pre-requisites to be created - both in terms of physical infrastructure and mindset. We have inherited a past, for which we cannot be held responsible; and have fashioned the present on the basis of development models which have undergone many mid-course corrections. The path to the future - a future in which India and Indians will play a dominant role in world affairs - is replete with opportunities and challenges. Break from the past, in a number of key areas, is necessary in order to achieve our vision. We have within ourselves the capacity to succeed.

R. Natarajan

Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

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