When I came to the U.S.A. in 1976, the American electronics industry was experiencing a rapid growth. The large companies of today, such as Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Apple, Cisco, and Google were either small companies or not yet formed.

During this era, there were four Asian tigers: Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. They were all considered third world countries. But, the economies of these countries were going through a fast paced growth. In the subsequent 25 years, each of these countries took advantage of the first wave of the electronics and semi-conductor outsourcing trend. They first focused on building semiconductor assembly and test plants and later fabrication centers. In addition, Taiwan built a PC infrastructure, Korea built a cellular-phone infrastructure, Singapore built a storage disk-drive infrastructure, and Hong Kong built a variety of subcontracting plants while positioning itself as the gateway to China. Today, these four countries are neither poor nor third world countries any more.

During most of this era, I watched India miss a series of opportunities on the international scene to establish itself as an outsourcing hub, and to rapidly grow its economy. It missed the semiconductor assembly and test plants, the fabs, the computer manufacturing, and then the cell-phone manufacturing. There were two main reasons. First, India went through a series of government and policy changes that sought to protect local companies and viewed foreign investments with suspicion. The second reason was that all of the earlier industries were hardware industries. India, with its traditional bureaucracy, had a difficult time providing the infrastructure and logistics support required to manufacture hardware efficiently. For example, it used to take days to clear an incoming or outgoing international shipment.

It was only in the early1990s that India shifted from its historical socialist bent to a free-market environment and as a result its economy began growing fast.