Vinit Nijhawan: Serial Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist

Passage to India Epilog

Boston Tuesday January 20

 

I have been back from India for about 2 weeks and have had time to reflect on my trip and to view my hometown of Boston with a fresh pair of eyes. The front page news in India was about Satyam’s $1 billion fraud and India’s impotence in stopping Pakistani-supported terrorism. Back in Boston it has been about Madoff’s $50 billion fraud and Israel’s Gaza war. The flat world indeed!

 

Satyam’s fraud is being compared to Enron, though it is likely that Satyam with hundreds for Global 1000 customers will survive. Ramalinga Raju, the CEO of Satyam and his brother are in prison, Madoff remains in his $7M apartment on bail. As I think about these two events, I am struck by one commonality: the ability of smart people to fleece others in their close communities. In the case of Madoff, the global Jewish community is shocked at how he defrauded several Jewish philanthropies and individuals of billions of dollars. Raju comes from a tight community of Rajputs (the warrior class who are predominantly in northern India) who came to Hyderabad to serve the Nizam or King in pre-colonial times. Raju comes from a landowning farming family with strong connections to the state of Andhara Pradesh (AP), whose capital is Hyderabad. He has a web of connections to the business and political elite in AP who will find it difficult to distance themselves. Likewise, I imagine the Jewish community is concerned about the negative image of the community as a result of Madoff’s misdeeds.

 

As is evident from all the strife around the world, humans are still drawn to their communities. The U.S. is increasingly settling into like-minded communities who overwhelmingly vote democrat or republican. Having just watched President Obama’s inauguration speech along with a couple of hundred people in the cradle American democracy, the town library in Lexington, I am hopeful that the divide-and-conquer colonial era is drawing to a close. We have the first brown-skinned leader of a predominantly white-skinned country, son of a citizen of Kenya, a former British colony. In his inaugural speech Obama said “our patchwork heritage is strength not weakness”, and I truly believe that both the U.S. and India share this patchwork heritage. The Indian peninsula has seen inward migration from the first humans to leave Africa 60,000 years ago to Aryans from Central Asia, Muslims from Turkey, Jews from Spain, Zorastrians from Persia, and Christians from Europe. In spite of these conquering migrations, or perhaps because of the relatively peaceful integration of these immigrants, for hundreds of years India was the richest region on the planet. The U.S. is now the richest country in the world and the citizens of the U.S. in choosing President Obama have astonished the rest of the world, many of whom live in former European colonies.

 

Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to lead the U.S. and the world into a new transnational era: jumpstart a post-carbon economy, bring about free trade in goods, and solve major post-colonial border disputes (Kashmir, Palestine, several in Africa) that will go a long way to weakening the foundation of muslim terrorists.  Just as he energized a new U.S. generation by using the new person-to-person medium of the internet to transmit his message, perhaps he will directly communicate to hundreds of millions opted-in cell phone users across the globe with a new message: “let us build not destroy”.

 

Boston and Massachusetts is at the center of this new transnational era. Many of Obama’s close advisors hail from universities and public institutions in Boston. The children of the political and business elite from many countries around the world come to study here and whether they stay or return, form bonds with native born Americans that last a lifetime. A formal social network of Boston-area alumni would certainly span the world and keep Boston relevant in the 21st century…calling all entrepreneurs!

 

Post-colonial President

Passage to India Part 8

Mumbai-Delhi Tuesday December 23

I boarded the overnight train to Delhi at Bombay Central Terminal (the mixed use of old and new city names for Bombay is a metaphor for old and new India—the old structures retain the original Bombay and everything new is named Mumbai). I had forgotten to print out my e-ticket and was prepared to battle/sweet talk my way onto the train. My last train ride in India was over 20 years ago and I have a lasting memory of patiently standing in a queue to purchase a ticket that never moved as people muscled their way to the front of the queue. Getting on the train required sharp elbows and more than likely the conductor had sold your seat to the highest bidder. The contrast this time was stark. I had to pay Rs.50 ($1) to get a ticket printed out on the train. The familiar red-clad coolies/porters were still around but there was no need for their help, the boarding of the train was orderly, seats were assigned and the conductor was Amtrak-like amiable.

The train departed Mumbai on time, the orderlies prepared my bed in the four-bed compartment, with spartan but crisply laundered sheets and I promptly went to sleep. A couple of hours later I was joined in my compartment by two gentlemen who had boarded at an unknown station. I was in the Rajdhani express train, a series of overnight trains between the metropolitan cities in India. My ticket had cost about $65, a flight would have been $110. I wanted to experience train travel and to get a sense of the geography of India’s industrial corridor, running between Mumbai and Delhi, encompassing the modern states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, the central state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), the tourist state of Rajasthan and the largest and one of the poorest states in India, Uttar Pradesh (UP). I was traveling on the most expensive ticket on the Rajdhani, the least expensive was about $1.50.

 

I woke up at the crack of dawn when the porter entered the compartment to offer tea. I watched the sunrise over a misty, flat landscape. Everywhere I have been in India the sky is hazy. I cannot ascertain if it is industrial pollution, winter mist or smoke from wood fires, perhaps a mix of all three. Even here in the countryside the sky is hazy. It is as if the entire country is an incense filled temple. The passing landscape is a dusty brown and is dotted with patches of green marking small farms, stunted trees and an occasional herd of cows. Every thirty minutes or so we pass through a small town with a train station. Garbage is strewn everywhere on the tracks and occasionally there is a garbage dump alongside the tracks at the edge of a town, with foraging pigs and cows.

One of my companions is a Sikh gentlemen whose cellphone jingles a bhangra ringtone every few minutes. He appears to be a little under the weather and sleeps in between calls and occasional visits from people on the train: “Papa-ji kaisay ho!” (How are you, pops?). Just passed a larger town called Ratlam. We must be in MP since this where my wife used to get off to go to Indorethe capital of MP and onto the hill station of Mau to visit her aunt.

The landscape is greener now, dotted with yellow fields of mustard, irrigation fed no doubt as the last rainfall was likely during monsoons in July/August. The train passes over largely dry riverbeds. Power lines and telecom towers are everywhere. Motorcycles and trucks wait at level crossings. Kachrod station passes by in a flash of yellow walls and red bougainvillea. A field of cotton with a dozen men and women hand picking. A southbound flatbed freight train passes by, our train slows down with jerky braking, dwarf palms dot the sides of the tracks. I recall Yasheng Huang of MIT mentioning that the India is a tropical country while China is a temperate country and life is more difficult in tropical climates. Two days before Christmas I am sitting in an air conditioned train looking out at laborers working in what appears to be hot sun. In the bathroom I poke my hand out the open window and air feels cool. We fly by Nagda, a larger town in MP. I have a conversation with a porter in the hallway. Apparently this is a special Rajdhani that runs during holiday periods. He says that is not as luxurious as the daily Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi.

I don a long-sleeved t-shirt as the AC is slightly chilly. I have managed to avoid sickness so far, neither catching a virus nor bacteria via contaminated food or water. My travelling companion has a bad cold and I want to be cautious. I offer him a Motrin from my medicine kit.

We slow down to pass by Suwasa. There are a few schoolgirls riding their bicycles on the road parallel to the train tracks, all dressed in a school colored salwar kamiz. Their braided ponytails and dopatas (long scarves) trail in the breeze as they chat and ride. The landscape is increasingly turning yellow, with fields and fields of mustard. The country side appears to have more people. A child is flying a kite, apparently not made of traditional tissue paper but of foil. I had met a businessman who is supplying foil for kites and my first thought was the environmental damage all these abandoned kits would cause.

 

Stopped in Kota for 10 minutes. Got a chance to step out and stretch my legs. Lunch was being loaded. Crossed the Chambol river really a stream threading the middle of a huge flood plain. Got into a vigorous conversation with my cabin mates about the problems in India. This seems to be a favorite topic of conversation. Just found out the Sikh gentleman Pratap Singh Fouzdar who is a minor television celebrity who won the 2nd season of reality TV show The Great Indian Laughter Challenge. That’s why everyone keeps stopping by to say hello to him. On top of this he is a minor industrialist, manufacturing synchromesh gears for jeeps and army vehicles out of Agra. I am astonished by the level of entrepreneurship in India. There is no social safety net so everyone is hustling to make a living. Every commercial transaction has an element of negotiation, generally humorously exchanged. There is surprisingly very little pleading or bitterness evident from the poorest of street hawkers when you don’t buy—someone else from the mass of consumers will.

The other cabin mate is a Bihari from Patna who is a project manager for Neptune, a manufacturer of industrial power conditioning equipment. They commented on the sarkari (subservient) nature of Indians: conditioned in pre-colonial and colonial times to a hierarchy that exploited them: peasants by landowners (zamindars); they in turn by the Raja’s and the Raja’s by the British. This hierarchy sucked wealth out of the country during colonial times.

We arrived in Delhi almost two hours late, so much for Lalu-inspired efficiency! The car park at the Nizammudin train station was packed and chaotic. As with most activities in India, great intent, lousy execution.

Nizammudin Limited

 

 

The Great Indian Laughter Champion

Passage to India Part 7

Pune Monday December 22

 

I visited the cerebral city of Pune, 120 miles from south east of Bombay on the Deccan plateau. Pune is the closest parallel city to Boston, with a multitude of universities and government research labs. I attended high school in Pune over 30 years ago. The city was unrecognizable, with huge population and industrial growth. While no Detroit, the automobile industry has a big presence in Pune. It is the headquarters of Bajaj the largest worldwide manufacture of two-wheelers (scooters and motorcycles), three-wheelers (those ubiquitous yellow black auto rickshaws that Hollywood sees as a caricature of India). Tata Motors builds trucks, buses and now cars in Pune. My father had brought us to Pune, called Poona in those days, to help launch the Tata Motors truck plant in 1970. Pune has also become a growing IT hub of product development outsourcing.

 

I thought I might escape the crushing traffic jams of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore while I was in Pune; I was mistaken. If there is a symbol of modern India it is that of honking cars and two-wheelers crawling along at walking pace. The three-lane toll expressway from Mumbai to Pune was just like the Mass Turnpike, we were cruising at 70 miles per hour. However it took two hours getting out of Mumbai and two hours to get into Pune, covering about ten miles in each case. India’s transportation infrastructure cannot keep up with the growth of vehicles on the road. Some comparisons, the US has about 11 million km of paved and unpaved roads with about 250M vehicles. India has 3.3 km of roads with tbd vehicles. Most of the vehicles in India are in the four metropolitan cities, with Delhi alone adding about 1,000 new vehicles per month. India cannot emulate the US and depend on roads alone for transportation; it has to build a rail public transport system in cities.

 

The intercity railway network is the largest in the world, with over 2 billion passengers transported quarterly. I have decided to take an 18-hour train journey from Mumbai to Delhi in first class sleeper. I booked the trip online at the Indian Railways website in just a few minutes. The Indian Railways is one of the few government departments that has improved service for the public in the past few years. The Railway minister in Parliament is the erstwhile Lalu Prasad, a breathtakingly dishonest politician who as the Chief Minister of Bihar, brought that state to terminal economic decline. In true American style he has reinvented himself as a competent federal minister, earning a case study at Harvard Business School.

 

Bangalore’s new airport was delightfully efficient and clean and I have heard that the new airport in Hyderabad, the life sciences capital of India, is even better. Air travel is cheap and generally a delightful experience within India. Railway station and airports will soon be connected to urban public transport. Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai are all building a metro system, with Delhi clearly in the lead.

 

The electricity grid in India is notoriously unreliable. Most of the problem is due to demand outstripping supply. It is also due to the enormous “leakage” of power, ie power that is stolen with the complicity of corrupt municipal officials. As a result there is a huge industry of distributed backup power, every house and office has battery backup UPSs, and diesel generators. The noise and air pollution from these back up generators can be experienced at any retail marketplace. With the nuclear cooperation agreement signed with the US (and France and Russia), India is embarking on construction of a dozen or so nuclear reactors. India is going to buy this reactor technology from these countries and there are billions of dollars of business up for grabs. From what I have heard US companies are in third place.

 

India’s biggest infrastructure challenge is that of clean water. Most of the country receives rain only during a 2-month long monsoon season. The rest of the year water is available from the ground or glacier fed rivers. Municipal water is generally contaminated and available for only a few hours a day. Most people augment municipal water by buying water from private suppliers who ship it in tank trucks. Every house and building has water storage tanks that need to be cleaned regularly so the water doesn’t get further contaminated. Every house also has a water filter to produce drinking water. Bottled water is common and a must for foreigners like me.

 

Amongst the Christmas greetings I am receiving on my Blackberry is one that has a hilarious comparison of cow economics in various countries: Indian corporation, you have two cows you worship them; Chinese corporation, you have two cows with 300 people milking them, you declare full employment and imprison the journalist who tries to tell the truth. US corporation, you sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows and then hire a consultant to analyze why the cow dropped dead! Feels bizarre reading emails from Detroit about cows while I gaze out scrawny cows nibbling in the fields we are passing by.

 

 

Passage to India Part 6

Mumbai Friday December 19, 2008

 

The TiE Entrepreneurial Summit in Bangalore was a huge success--the sponsoring hotel was barely able to manage the large crowd. What struck me was how young the crowd was and how aggressive the entrepreneurs were in approaching anyone who looked like they had money to invest. Speaker after speaker lauded the “demographic dividend” offered by all those young people and to be reaped by India. Implicit in this comment was that this group would be well educated. Everyone by now has heard about the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) and perhaps even the All India Institute of Medicine (AIIM). These fine institutions graduate just tens of thousands students annually. There are many other engineering colleges and management institutes but the most are not graduating world class talent. This is even more evident in high school. The elite private high schools (Cathedral, Campion in Mumbai and Sriram, Modern in Delhi) are excellent but most Indian teenagers in the metros get subpar education at public high schools. In smaller towns the options are even fewer.

 

Nonetheless the kinetic energy of these young entrepreneurs is infectious. One young man bewitched our table with a multitude of startup companies that had been selected by his cleantech non-profit for fundraising help. These varied from electric scooter companies to biodiesel producers. A couple of us were ready to start a company to import scooters to the U.S.! The unwritten story behind these eager entrepreneurs is the hard work they have put in to get to where they are. It starts in elementary school, most students put in a full school day (including hours of commuting) and then take extra tutoring to prepare them for entry exams to the elite private high schools. To get entrance to an IIT or medical school, students have to study 5-6 hours per day for couple of years, in addition to attending regular school hours. Only one in a hundred applying get into these elite colleges. It is questionable that all this studying prepares Indian youth better than American youth for real world jobs but it certainly instills a strong work ethic.

 

Traditionally youth is celebrated in the U.S. but in India age (read wisdom) is respected. This seems to be changing, especially in the workforce. An executive search professional I was chatting with said that many executive jobs came with a stipulation that the candidate be younger than 45. With so many young people available why pay extra for tired, old wisdom?! I don’t know if the average age of Indian companies is lower than that of U.S. companies but the senior ranks certainly seem younger.

 

TiE is launching a chapter in Tokyo and I had a chance to discuss Japan’s new found fascination with India with the founders. Apparently the Japanese were taken aback that many multinational companies in Japan suddenly began to have Indians as the managing head. Japan has always had a historical fascination with India, the home of Buddhism but was always considered an industrial backwater. With the success of its IT and especially automobile parts companies (Toyota Kirlowsker’s plant in Bangalore produces as or more reliable parts as Toyota’s Japanese plants), aging Japan appears to have discovered talented India. There are hordes of Koreans and Japanese on all the elite golf courses in Delhi and Bangalore!

 

National Entrepreneurs Network (NEN) business plan finalists

Passage to India Part 5

Bangalore Monday December 15

 

For forty five years after independence Indian companies for all purposes operated without competition. Monopolies were granted by the government for extended periods. Many fortunes were made, both by industrialists and corrupt politicians. Consumers had to wait years for “luxury” goods such as cars and telephones. This began to change in 1992, when in the face of an economic collapse the Indian economy began to reform. Slowly, industrial sector after sector was opened up to multiple competitors, even foreign ones. The IT industry evolved slightly differently as the government babus (bureaucrats) were so used to regulating physical goods that the industry was able to export its bits and bytes via satellite links without intervention.

 

Today India has hyper competition in many industries and consumers are the net beneficiaries. There are five major wireless carriers with about equal market share (contrast this with the U.S. which rapidly moving to a duopoly of Verizon and AT&T). As a result making a cellphone voice call in India is the cheapest in the world. My monthly cellphone bill in Boston averages $120 or about $4 per day. I am spending about 50 cents a day in India. Albeit cellphone conversations in India tend to be quick and short, I can only attribute this to how costly phone calls used to be just a few years ago. There are a multitude of startup companies offering value-added services in this vibrant ecosystem. I met a young engineer who had bootstrapped a company to offer mobile internet advertising services to brands. He was saying that the growth of mobile internet usage in rural cities was exploding as small scale business men had no other way to access the internet for relevant content such as local weather, crop prices, etc.

 

Similarly there is significant competition amongst domestic airlines. The customer service on these airlines reminds me of flying in the 1980s in the U.S.. Call centers that respond within seconds, ground staff that is friendly and efficient and best of all, in-flight service that astounds (I just had a flight attendant service a bathroom after a particularly long winded customer!). My sister-in-law just flew from Delhi to Toronto on a Jet Airways flight and said it was the best business class experience she had ever had, and she is a frequent and demanding flier. I was conversing with an executive at the biggest training school for airline staff and she said that they train about 2,000 customer service reps annually and only the crème de ala crème make it on to plane as flight attendants, and yes, looks are an important criteria.

 

In contrast almost any government run service is horrendous. Delhi’s domestic airport was mobbed at 5:30am for early morning flights. Security was overwhelmed and chaotic. I witnessed a shouting match between a patiently queuing customer and someone jumping to the head of the line because they were late for a flight. There are exceptions of course. The entire city of Delhi appears to be under construction with an extensive expansion to their 4-year old metro (subway) underway to be ready for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Crews are literally working 24x7 with minor disruption to traffic. I contrast this to the Winter Street exit off Rte 95 in Waltham where repair of single bridge has been going for over three years with no end in sight. Interestingly elections are hard fought in India because politicians end up in personally lucrative monopolies. Since they maybe in power only for a single term, they try to extract as much graft as they can. Government led corruption is the bane of emerging economies from democratic India to autocratic China. Fortunately India has a highly competitive press corps that is valiantly trying to inform the public about government’s misdeeds. In the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attack, some politicians’ heads rolled as a result of press coverage of their ineptitude. In the U.S. no leader lost their job as a result of the security lapses in advance of 9/11. Nevertheless the Indian public would gladly trade the U.S. public sector for India’s. Perhaps our multitude of outsourced government contractors should set up in India and begin lobbying for outsourced services from the Indian government, a win-win situation for both countries!

 

There is no doubt India’s youngsters are eager to move up the social ladder and are prepared to study hard, work hard and compete aggressively.

 

Ready to compete in the global economy

Passage to India Part 3

New Delhi December 10

 

The housing meltdown in the U.S. got me thinking about the property market in India. With the dramatic urbanization and growth of Indian cities property prices have skyrocketed. In good neighborhoods in Delhi prices have increased 100x in 30 years. I met a small dairy farmer who supplied a neighborhood with milk from a few cows by bicycle who had sold his property for $2M (see the photo of him delivering milk).  Property and property rights, or the lack thereof, is a central theme in free market India. India has national, state and municipal laws supporting intellectual and physical property but enforcement of those laws are weak. This is especially the case in housing. In India possession is more than 9/10ths of the law it is the law. In a situation similar to rent controlled properties in some U.S. cities (remember rent control in Cambridge?), there are millions of tenants who occupy properties, pay nominal rent and cannot be evicted.

Land is an emotional issue in India. Hundreds of millions of farmers still make a living off their land. The size of the average farm has decreased since independence as generation after generation has subdivided land among their children. In the cities single family homes have grown into multi-storey apartment buildings with each floor given to a child as inheritance. Even the mighty Tata Motors was forced to move their Nano car plant from one state to another because small farmers protested against having their land taken by eminent domain. While India is a mobile society, people tend to retain their ancestral land. This creates a shortage of properties for sale, especially in old established neighborhoods in cities.

Most Indian families I know have a property dispute within the family, generally resulting from inheritance. The legal system is slow and corrupt and it can take upwards for 10 years to resolve disputes (it is very easy to delay the legal process by bribing clerks and even judges). As a result possession has become the instrument of choice in such disputes. When the second parent passes away the children start moving themselves or their relatives into parts of the property to stake a claim. Naturally this creates discord within families. Feudal India is never far from the surface of 21st century India.

In contrast intellectual property is well protected in India. Partly as a result of joining the WTO and the fact that most ordinary people are not affected by IP, it is not politicized and the courts generally act quickly to resolve disputes. A colleague who returned from California to take care of an ailing mother with Alzheimer’s, is running a product development outsourcing company. A couple of his employees naively showed software source code they were working on to a competitor in the process of a job interview. Subsequently a major U.K competitor of their U.S. customer came out with an identical product. My colleague was able to sue in the Indian courts and put his employees in jail.

 

Milk-walla Millionaire

Passage to India Part 2

Chandigarh December 7, 2008

I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improve four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city which the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dentist graduate, to a young engineer who works with the Tata’s. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

 

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S.to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarhis considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India's bread basket. However most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S. 

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarhand I had the chance to meet with the Director of the college Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Phillips Labs from Delhi. Phillips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India, they support all of Phillips divisions including the medical division in Andover, MA. For example they recently launch a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston Universityhas a world renowned public health department that has projects in India, I need to connect them to Phillips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, who have been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cellphone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cellphone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cellphone retail distributors. They have been struggling to differentiate themselves other than price. He told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but stumbled on to a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most Indian villages and is unreliable when it is. I asked him if he considered differentiating on the cellphone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers.

Obama and the end of the colonial era

Like most Americans I have been awestruck by Barack Obama's capture of the White House. I have also been pondering the significance of this historic event. Of course the first African-American as President is historic, especially in light of America's history of slavery. The outpouring of congratulations and celebration from around the world has been equally astonishing. Why are so many people inspired by Americans' choice of President-elect Obama? This is the question that perplexes me.

My grandfather came to the US in 1947, accompanied by my father who was 17. Invited by the US government, my grandfather, a soil physicist, came to the midwest to Kansas State University. My father began to study engineering at UC Berkley but soon ran out of money and continued his studies at Kansas State while sharing accomodations with my grandfather. He recounted an incident where my grandfather and he were told to sit at the back of the bus in the colored section. India had just got its independence from British rule and 300 million Indians were now free of colonial rule. To now suffer discrimination on the basis of skin color (my grandfather was a professor and the bus driver was likely at best high school educated) was unacceptable to him and he eventually got off the bus rather than comply.

During the 450 year colonial period western European countries, namely Britain, Spain, Netherlands and France in order of scope, colonized and greatly enriched themselves, mostly at the expense of native people. They ruled with a sense of Darwinian superiority of the white races and its dominant religion: Christianity. The ascendancy of European countries was driven by technological innovation, including the understanding and codifying of free market economics. Whether it was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these ideas came from the West.

Though the second world war accelerated the demise of colonialism, my contention is the colonial era has truly come to its conclusion with the election of Obama. It has taken America, a post colonial power, to bring about its end, with the free election of the first non-white leader of the West. This is what is resonating around the world, especially in many emerging countries who were colonised: India, Brazil, and African countries.

Sunita Williams and Bangalore

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!