IT - superpower hype

By S. Swaminathan

The recurrent lament that India has often, in the past, missed epochal opportunities for joining the global industrial mainstream, used to be part of the national psyche. But not any more. The click economy, with its ``larger than life'' image has already made such an impact, not only in the capital markets but also in the domain of urban public life, that today the intelligentsia believe that the country is emerging as a decisive leader in IT. So sweeping is the headway made by Indian software professionals - in the U.S. and gradually in Europe and perhaps in the not-distant future in Japan - that more and more among the educated youth in India tend to look upon IT and its global market as their virtual destination.

There is no question that the Internet, e-commerce and e- governance and ``e'' in everything have already become national goals, however muted and hyperbolic the articulation could be.

When it comes to verbal leap-frogging about IT, there is none to match the zeal and gullibility of the ``tall-talking'' Minister for Information Technology, Mr. Pramod Mahajan. He knows all about it - how to make India the IT superpower by the year 2008. The trouble is that excessive exultation over the impressive successes achieved by Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and their cohorts and the tendency to float numbers such as the $50 billion output in 2008 (as against $6 billion in 1999-2000) obfuscate the enormous odds against India in the global race for the IT markets.

A masterpiece of sober realism

Those who heard Mr. P. C. Kohli of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) at the Convention of the Madras Management Association last week have many valid reasons to thank themselves for the ozone of clear understanding of the IT scenario in the country which they inhaled. Mr. Kohli received the prestigious Business Leadership Award for the year and delivered the Anantharamakrishnan Memorial lecture. Having been the motive-force behind the IT pioneers in India - TCS - Mr. Kohli is in a unique position to unravel the saga of the IT industry in India and to provide pointers on how much of the frenzied pseudo-claims about India becoming an IT superpower can be canalised into concrete action-programmes for helping the country overcome its centuries-old ``deprivation syndrome'' whether in literacy or medicare, agriculture or in governance itself.

TCS, the unsung legend

It is indeed a tribute to the MMA panel led by Mr. N. R. Narayanamurthy, that they zeroed on a ustad among IT gurus in India, Mr. Kohli, a power-engineer transformed into an IT- prophet, for their choice of business leader for the year. Mr. Kohli modestly reminded the MMA audience that TCS was set up as far back as in 1968-69 at a time when the new IT technology had just made its advent on the global scene. From a total revenue of Rs. 5-6 crores in 1977, TCS today has grown into a giant with a total revenue of over Rs. 3,000 crores and all without the trappings of a listed company.

Until 1984 when the policy environment for the IT industry began to move away from obsessive controls and import restrictions, TCS was literally going through a proactive period of learning the new technology and upgrading its own capabilities. How many companies in India can claim that their major break-through came in the form of a global assignment? That the TCS made a success of its first assignment in 1974-75 for Burroughs, the U.K. based MNC, designing and setting up a healthcare system, speaks volumes for its competence and credibility.

How the Government of India in 1977 checkmated the efforts of TCS to import computers and how a bucolic Finance Minister, Mr. Charan Singh, scuttled a TCS project for computerisation of the income-tax department constitute revealing glimpses of how anti- scientific prejudice dominated the policy-domain and how the country lost almost two decades in taking advantage of the new technology.

Kohli, an early prophet

Is India inherently competent to ride the waves of IT? Today there seems to be wide agreement that the Indian capability in mathematics and logical thinking besides the proficiency in English, gives a vantage point for the country in the global software market-place. That Mr. Kohli not only anticipated all this as early as in 1975 but also expressed it in categorical terms is an astonishing dimension of this great if uncelebrated achiever. Without a tinge of egoism, Mr. Kohli told his MMA audience last week that he recognised almost 25 years ago that the new IT technology would unleash new opportunities for India. This is what he had said as part of his presidential address at the annual convention of the Computer Society of India at Ahmedabad in January 1995. ``Today, there is a new revolution, and that is the revolution in information technology, which requires neither mechanical bias nor mechanical temperament. Primarily, it requires the capability to think clearly. This we have in abundance. We have an opportunity to participate in this revolution on an equal basis - we have the opportunity, even to assume the leadership.''

Need for sterner stuff

Mr. Kohli has no reason to doubt the immense potential for IT in India although he is convinced that we are nowhere near the top league even in the much-exaggerated software sector. Our software output of $5.7 billion in 1999-2000 was a trifle compared to the global output of $350 billion. Even small countries such as Ireland and Israel have comparable software output as India has. As Mr. Kohli vividly described the scene, India's total output of hardware and software is less than one per cent of the global output, our PC addition last year was 1.5 million, out of 125 million that was the addition to the global PC population, our total spending on IT is about 0.7 per cent of the GDP (as compared to 3 per cent in Singapore and the U.S.) and what is even more telling, computerisation in the Government sector in India accounts for 7 per cent of the market while it is as high as 50 per cent in most of the advanced countries.

There is no question that visions of India emerging as an IT superpower will prove mere mirages unless the country embarks on an aggressive programme for development of hardware apart from addressing the primitive conditions of infrastructure, both in telecom and in power. The point is that even for generating software capabilities which can make for the abridgement of the dreaded digital divide, the country needs to invest massively in computer hardware. For otherwise the current obsession with software exports might easily breed a new culture of ``indentured labour'' in the IT sector, for global pickings.

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