point
Menu
Magazines
Browse by year:
September - 2002 - issue > View From the Top
India’s Second War of Independence
Sunday, September 1, 2002
India stands on the threshold of hope and history today. Indeed, the empires of the future shall be the empires of the mind and the battleground shall be one of ideas. The winners and losers in the years to come shall be decided here and in India-and its people appear well-poised to win, for the country is prepared to play a significant role in the knowledge economy which lies ahead. That would also serve as India's second tryst with destiny, its second war of independence—this time around, for economic freedom, as important for India as the political freedom achieved in the first war. We learned from our first struggle that good governance cannot be a substitute for self-governance, but it is high time we recognized the truth of the reverse statement: self-governance can never be a substitute for good governance!


The Indian Information Technology (IT) revolution is happening everywhere in India-in boardrooms, in schools and colleges, in roadside telephone booths, and even in government. In fact, IT is rapidly becoming the only phenomenon to cheer about in contemporary India. However, one of the key criticisms against IT and its advocates is that it is elitist in nature. The argument goes that IT caters to the rich and the affluent middle class—while for the lower middle class and the poor, it's a total waste. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leftists of every hue are trying to malign whatever gains are achieved through IT by advancing such inane arguments. Coupled with this is the other easy criticism that IT can never be a substitute for food and water and, therefore, investments in it are unjustified and wrong.


Let's take the second argument first. Indeed, IT and IT-related services couldn't be a substitute for food and water. IT never claimed to displace food and water in the menu of the average individual! IT cannot, and must not, be compared with either food or water—it's like comparing apples and oranges. A society needs food and water and IT, and viewing them as substitutes is erroneous.


The traditional software and knowledge-based industries have created several thousand jobs and this is what has put India on the course to becoming a knowledge superpower. However, there is yet another micro-revolution happening, to which few have paid adequate attention. This is the IT-enabled services revolution. Consider the following: GE has set up its global back-office facility at Hyderabad slated to create more than 6,000 lower middle class jobs very soon. This facility processes insurance claims, credit card queries, and so on received from across the globe for a fraction of the cost that it would take in the West. Similarly, HSBC has set up its global data processing center in Hyderabad. Moreover, Daksh answers the queries of Amazon.com customers from Gurgaon, while several other big and small companies are springing up all over the country offering similar services. Spectramind in Delhi has lots of Fortune 500 companies as its clients and has exceeded 1,000 employees in a very short period of time. Likewise, the numerous e-governance initiatives blooming across India are a powerful testimony to the fact that IT is not really elitist anymore—it's a means to an end, a means to achieve good governance and to attract foreign direct investment leading to an exports-driven growth strategy.


The world of information presents an immense opportunity which India can capitalize on. The entire physical community of atoms—that is, all things that can be touched, felt, seen and used—has a corresponding community of bits as well. This is true of almost the entire community with perhaps only a few honorable exceptions. To give an example, one-third of the entire health care industry in the United States—about $350 billion—consists of the costs of capturing, storing, processing, and retrieving information-patient care, cost accounting, personnel administration, and insurance claims. By this measure, the health care industry is a larger information industry than the "information industry" itself! The healthcare arena is an opportunity that's waiting to explode in India, and if we capture even a tiny 10% of it, it will create enormous value and wealth for the country.


Technology takes birth in Silicon Valley every day, and it is powered by an Indian brain. NetScaler, a hot new product from India's IT tsar BV Jagadeesh, doubles Internet access speeds, while Google—backed by Ram Shriram—is considered to be one of the fastest search engines in the world, capable of finding almost anything, anywhere in seconds. Importantly, these tech gurus help India's leaders gain a deep understanding of the difference between fighting for slices of a limited, stagnant pie and making the pie itself larger and larger. If these people can work wonders upon leaving India's shores, why can't we give them an environment in which they can perform the same miracles within India? That's the real challenge for India as a country for the coming years—as is determining how to use IT to eliminate the governmental bureaucracy which currently plagues the process of delivering public services to the common people. Needless to say, there are several other challenges-at the level of both day-to-day operations and legislation-which must be urgently addressed in order to make this miracle happen.


The verdict of history is clear and unambiguous: namely, that fundamentalist posturing in any sphere of life only punishes its adherents with unmitigated disaster in the long run. This is simply because history always has her own revenge. Anyone who dares to trifle with its esoteric and immutable logic is only brewing the surest recipe for his own devastation. Those in India who are trying to instill the venom of jingoism and casteism into the bloodstream of yet another brand-new generation would do well to remember this lesson. The most important war for any nation lies within itself-to get its act together to win the war for economic independence. The triumph of a nation is best measured by its ability to recognize and internalize the limited truths found in competing doctrines. Ultimately, the raison d'être of India itself lies in winning this war.



Srivatsa Krishna belongs to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and, until recently, served under the Government of Andhra Pradesh in India. He is currently on sabbatical at the Harvard Business School.

Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
facebook