The making of an economic juggernaut

The Maverick Effect: The Inside Story of India's IT Revolution
 

Author: Harish Mehta

Publisher: HarperBusiness

Pages: 271

Price: Rs 512

In the late 1980s, India’s software exports had just crossed $50 million. While it was recognised as a sunrise industry with a lot of promise, a host of rules and regulations impeded its rise.

Fast forward to today. India’s software exports are pegged at around $150 billion, and its biggest players are nursing dreams of becoming behemoths, each with annual revenues of $50 billion or $100 billion.

The Maverick Effect: The Inside Story of India’s IT Revolution by Harish Mehta traces this journey of around four decades, starting right from the days when the computing power in the hands of the country’s top software companies was a fraction of what a teenager might have at present. There are few who have had a ringside view of the information technology revolution in the country as Mr Mehta has. Being one of the founding members of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, he recounts the behind-the-scenes story of how NASSCOM came into being, the camaraderie among software players in often putting the industry ahead of themselves, its biggest triumphs and interesting tidbits about the things that sometimes went wrong.

Of course, it is not entirely a no-holds barred account. That can’t be expected given that the author is still very much someone with skin in the game, being the convenor of NASSCOM’s Chairpersons’ Council and executive chairman of a software company called Onward Technologies. Yet, Mr Mehta manages to regale the reader with interesting anecdotes throughout the 271-odd pages. Whether it his nervous encounters with the venerable F C Kohli, the first CEO of Tata Consulting Services, or the rigmaroles of pushing the industry’s agenda through the halls of government at a time when floppy disks were stapled to documents as samples of what was being exported, there’s a lot to be bookmarked.

Take for instance an episode when Manmohan Singh was finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government. At the time, an import duty of 25 per cent was levied on data and software tools that IT companies’ clients would send them. More than shelling out the money, the industry was being hurt due to the lag caused by these dispatches being held up in the customs department for weeks.

When NASSCOM took this problem to Dr Singh and requested him to bring down the duty to zero, Mr Mehta says that the finance minister’s retort was: “As regulators, we would never understand what you are importing or exporting. This way your industry would become the biggest hawala (money laundering) industry in the country!”

Ultimately the government of the day bought the idea when NASSCOM explained that honest entrepreneurs must not be penalised because of the possibility that some crooks would always try to game the system.

There are also certain things on which the author seeks to set the record straight with this personal account of the IT story. One such topic is that of the flamboyant Dewang Mehta, the president of NASSCOM from 1991 until his untimely death in 2001. Dewang had become the face of the industry in the 90s and loved to be the centre of attention in the media. Being at the helm of an organisation that wanted to get its message out and loud, but did not have a lot of money to spend on public relations, he constantly sought to hog the headlines.

Dewang’s streak served the IT industry well. But it also meant that the poster boy coloured outside the lines in ways that were not always palatable to NASSCOM members. The author contends that irrespective of everything, Dewang always had the country’s best interests in mind and his eyes welled up every time he read about a case of corruption in the newspapers.

Throughout the book, Harish Mehta similarly zooms into the role of several key individuals who played a part in furthering India’s IT story, from top bureaucrats to industry honchos. Yet one issue with the narrative is that it sometimes seems to superimpose the industry’s achievements with NASSCOM’s without sharing details about what levers the industry body might have pulled behind the scenes.

The book is several things at once. It is the memoir of a techie who returns to the motherland to aid in its economic progress. It is a first-hand account of the inflection points of one of the country’s most important industries. It also serves as a manual for lobbyists who might feel despondent with the pace of reforms when it comes to new-age technology policy.

With so many new details for industry outsiders, the book will serve as a handy compendium for anyone who wants to understand the story of India’s IT revolution — whether a technocrat in the developing world, a scholar of business, or anyone else seeking to understand how the grounds were laid for India’s emergence as a technology leader in the 21st century.

After all, it is a book that boasts of the recommendation of two stalwarts of the industry, N R Narayana Murthy and N Chandrasekaran, and is sure to age well.