Watching India race to the top

CYBER AGE From The Statesman
India’s strength and ingenuity
ND BATRA

India is becoming an integral part of the globalised economy and is clearly thriving on the synergy between multinational corporations and its indigenous strengths, which come from a high quality of education from its top universities, democratic institutions that create transparency, and the ingenuity of its people for innovative solutions to complex problems.

A few years ago, I was paired to play golf with a South Korean businessman, let’s call him Tom Chung, who was visiting the USA for business and to meet his children studying in New England. He was keenly interested in India, where he had established a manufacturing facility for an ancillary product in collaboration with a local industrialist in western India. At the fifth hole my curiosity got the better of me and I asked Chung: How do you compare Indian and Chinese workers? He smiled thoughtfully and said, “Chinese workers are hardworking but they need clear instructions, a blueprint to follow, to complete the work. Indian workers are probably not as self-disciplined and hardworking as the Chinese, but they are resourceful and ingenious. If there is a problem, they won’t sit down and wait for someone to come and help them. They would find creative ways to solve the problem. If something were broken or missing, they would improvise a substitute and fix it.”

Being familiar with American pop culture, Chung called it “the MacGyver positive”: Don’t just sit down. Do something and get out of the trouble. MacGyver was the protagonist of a 1980s TV series in which he showed his uncanny ingenuity at making complicated machines out of ordinary things. In the pilot episode, for example, MacGyver used his remarkable ingenuity by using an unusual tool, chocolate, in sealing a dangerous leak from an underground lab and rescued the trapped scientists. Indian workers, even those who don’t have much education, Chung said, display the same aptitude for innovativeness.

Call it junkyard ingenuity, but it is so widespread in India that it is almost a national trait. Today, India and the USA, for example, talk of strategic partnership, peaceful nuclear technology transfer, and energy cooperation, but there was a time when the USA treated India as a pariah.

In 1991, for example, the US state department banned the sale of computers to India that could do more than 900 million operations per second. How did India respond? In no time, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing developed a powerful series, Param-1000, which at that time was one of the most powerful computers of its kind, capable of diversity of applications in fields such as engineering, business, industry, space and nuclear technology.

Indian ingenuity served the supercomputing needs of the Indian scientific community and made possible the development and enhancement of India’s nuclear weapons programme, however controversial. The USA’s ubiquitous eye in the sky, the orbiting American satellites, could not detect the preparation of Pokhran because the Indian space scientists had precisely calculated the orbits of the satellites and worked around them to escape notice. But this high-end technological ingenuity grew up on the foundation laid by some of the brightest Indians of the 20th century, men like CV Raman, S Chandrashekhar, Har Gobind Khurana, SN Bose, Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, and not the least, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose rational and scientific outlook on life guided him to establish some of the finest science laboratories and institutions of higher learning.

Indian ingenuity is written all over the Silicon Valley from the co-founding of Sun Microsystems to the development of Pentium, PowerPoint, Hotmail, streaming video, digital satellite television, MPEG audio compression standard, and much more, as wonderfully told by Shivanand Kanavi in his book, Sand to Silicon: The Amazing Story of Digital Technology. But Kanavi forgot to discuss the contribution of one of the most brilliant innovative minds in India today, Faqir Chand Kohli, the doyen of Indian software development and outsourcing and the chairman emeritus of Tata Consultancy Services.

Speaking with Manjeet Kriplani of Business Week last year, Kohli echoed what the South Korean businessman Chung had told me at the golf links: “Big companies are geared up for incremental innovation. For us in India, the cost of doing innovative technology is very low.
The capability of India is its people. We can assemble more good and intelligent people than anywhere in the world. I admire China, but our people are better.India has ingenuity. If an ordinary car mechanic is aided by computers and simulation, his productivity leaps.”

At 80 plus, Kohli has given himself a new mission: To harness digital technology for spreading mass education, especially in India’s more than a half million villages.

Ingenuity is another name for what systems experts call as “equifinality,” which means transcending a system’s limitations by finding an alternative route to reach the same goal. A creative and ingenious mind becomes restless when he hits a wall and asserts, there has to be another way; and he improvises by transferring intelligence from one application to another.

But individual entrepreneurial ingenuity has its limitations. Bangalore could transcend the limitations of its poor infrastructure, power and transportation, for example, by building captive power plants and satellite communications to reach its outsourcing clients in the USA and elsewhere. But the shining city on the hill has left rest of the country far behind. Now the question is whether Indian ingenuity and its “swarming intelligence”, to borrow a term from the science of emergence, can be applied to collective action to build 24/7 reliable highways, ports, railroads, power plants and airports to compete with a super-competitive China.