March - 2001 - issue > Cover Feature

Until November 2000, Maniben, from Kutch in Gujarat, India, had never seen either a telephone or television. A non-profit organization featured her mirror-work embroidered tie on www.peoplelink.org. Soon, Maniben received orders from Britain to make her “Millennium” ties. Old ways seem to be changing.


In Gujarat, women take milk to a weighbridge, where it is weighed, the fat quantity assessed, and the payment immediately calculated by a computer. Not long ago, middlemen could cheat these women, saying the fat content was low.
A veterinarian in Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu is computerizing the details of animal and poultry diseases, and in Andhra Pradesh, a professor is also working on software that will provide villagers with information on animal diseases.
On the business side, the healthcare industry has been in shambles, the banking sector is straining under insurmountable transactions and software companies are suffering from lack of infrastructure, but all of that may be changing new technologies come into play.

New IT Leaders
The future of the IT industry in India is being created not only by the Satyams and the Wipros, but by entrepreneurs making bold moves.


Take any red hot area in IT right now — intelligent optical networking, application servers, wireless networking, broadband devices, home networking, onboard automobile computers, handheld devices, security, encryption, 3G cell phone technologies — and you will find a lot of young Indian innovators hard at work.


A number of companies have appeared out of nowhere. And most of them are focusing on convergence and Internet infrastructure. Tejas Networks (backed by Desh Deshpande), Ishoni Networks (supported by angel investor Prakash Bhalerao), and Pramati Technologies are among those that are developing technologies.


The leapfrogging of technology is happening most notably in the communications industry. “India is able to get the latest technology in fiber optics, speed switches, networks and wireless,” says J. A. Chowdary, president and managing director of PortalPlayer India. D. V. S. Raju, managing director of VisualSoft Technologies explains, “There is a big market for core bandwidth creators, infrastructure software for next generation access networks, home gateways, wireless networking and application software platforms.”


Srini Kopolu, managing director of the Microsoft India Development Center, says, “India will have large global carriers, who will carry huge volumes of data on their optical fiber backbones. Wireless networking will also rule the industry in future.” But there are major challenges to realizing such an idealistic high bandwidth vision. Proponents of innovative solutions have run into regulatory hurdles that make scrapping the old network in favor of new technologies difficult. India currently has only three phone connections per 100 citizens, and aims to raise the figure to seven by 2005 and 15 by the year 2015. China has a teledensity that is about twice that much.

Unwired World
Some would look to wireless applications for answers to some of the barriers. Mobile Internet applications have suddenly taken off — although 3G wireless is not really developing as planned. The GSM world is united under UMTS and the new 3G wireless operators will soon require solid core wireless networking technology to go with GPRS. According to networking experts, the networking vendors are still not ready to meet the demand. But Indians are adopting wireless by using mobile phones in their homes — where for years they couldn’t get a land line.


Says Chowdary, “Wireless has the potential to cost effectively make the Indian broadband market more commercially attractive to service providers.” Intel Capital Director Sriram Viswanathan explains, “There are a lot of people trying to deliver backbone fiber infrastructure. But the challenge will be to connect to the consumer in the multiple dwelling unit (MDU). What will be attractive in India is finding a way to bring fiber to the MDU with either a cable modem or a shared DSL modem, and then be able to deliver it to the MDU either through Ethernet or through wireless in the local loop.”


With so much technological development going on in India, the country could well have the ability to bypass the infrastructure and systems that have been developed in countries like the US and leverage technology to create cost-effective innovations that will set new global trends. But the process will be an arduous one. If anything the Internet in India can be used to serve much more practical purposes than just surfing the Web and shopping. Things like crop information can be sent to public Internet call boxes — akin to the way telegrams or faxes have existed in the West. Such small developments can have huge impact. Advances will come in increments.