As Sunita Williams circles overhead our mutual hometown of greater Boston on the International Space Station, I am struck by the ascension of us Indians around the globe. We can be proud that a quarter of all technology startups in the United States in the past ten years with an immigrant CEO or CTO founder was an Indian-American. Proud that Bangalore and Gurgaon are as well known as Boston and Silicon Valley in technology circles. In contrast, having just returned from a whirlwind tour of four Indian cities, poverty, urban decay and a general lack of world class infrastructure, belie this new view of India and Indians.
Bangalore’s rise as one of the technology capitals of the world was not accidental. Government decisions made fifty years ago to locate defense research establishments, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore were key to what Bangalore is today. In particular ISRO headquarters established by Vikram Sarabhai in 1969 was an astonishing organization. I had the good fortune of meeting two of ISRO’s leaders: Prof. Satish Dhawan and Prof. U.R. Rao in the mid-80s. They exemplified today’s leaders in Bangalore: self-assured, humble and with a quite determination to have India join the league of leading scientific and engineering nations.
As a young overseas Indian visiting ISRO in the mid-80s, the place was an eye-opener for me. I discovered an India that was fresh, egalitarian and self-confident. This self-confidence in particular was refreshing—ISRO was building satellites, rockets and related technology completely indigenously with no outside help. This was in part because of the U.S. embargo on technology transfer but it was also a result of Homi Bhabha’s legacy. He set India on an independent path of nuclear and space ascendancy that has created the technical self-confidence evident in Bangalore, greater Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad. I recall hours of discussion with Kiran Karnik at ISRO SAC in Ahmedabad, when he was a young turk representing Doordarshan at ISRO. The country was planning on putting a satellite receiver in every village in India, beaming information from indigenous INSAT satellites. We speculated that there would be great social upheaval once villagers had access to the world and woke up to their potential. We were both right and wrong. There has been much change in India these past 20 years, but it has mainly affected urban India, villages essentially have remained the same.
Clearly there were visionaries in the government that set India on the right path fifty years ago with these great research institutions, and great post-secondary institutions such as IITs and IIMs. It allowed generations of leaders and managers to emerge that form the foundation of the industrial growth the country is experiencing and will do so over the next decade. What was lost was the will and vision to educate and make healthy every Indian child. In some ways these were the competing visions of economic development of India at Independence. Nehru felt that a top-down Soviet planning model was the fastest way to industrialize and bring people out of poverty. Gandhi’s instinct was to distribute economic development to the villages, using the spinning wheel as a metaphor. Clearly both economic growth models are needed.
We know that vision from government is necessary but best in the form of incentives to the private sector. India has a unique opportunity to learn from best governance practices in other large, diverse countries. These practices have to be applied to the unique situations in India. Let’s take transportation as an example. China has built thousands of kilometers of roads and dozens of airports but in the process hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. India’s democracy will not allow the same displacement of people. Clearly a different vision has to emerge for giving people and goods in rural India access to transportation. Will it be low cost jet aircraft flying from new regional airports or perhaps coastal ferries, or maybe light-rail? Most likely an innovative combination of all these will be needed.
There appears to be a political consensus forming in India that the country cannot skip the development of its agricultural and manufacturing economies. The service economy, though booming and world class, cannot provide employment to 80 million youth over the next two decades. In order for agriculture and manufacturing to thrive, India needs to invest billions in physical infrastructure: transportation, logistics, power, and telecommunications. India also needs to spend billions in soft infrastructure: education, and health.
Sunita Williams, a product of pluralistic India, is an inspiration for all, not just Indians. Even more so is the story of a non-profit organization Akshay Patra. Akshay Patra delivers half a million lunches daily to Indian elementary school children for Rs. 5 per lunch. Patra was founded by Indian entrepreneurs who have applied modern day logistics and distribution thinking to achieve enormous scale. With the right incentives Indian entrepreneurs can reach the moon!
New Delhi December 4, 2008