Why India is a tech laggard

The author attempts to figure out the underlying reasons for this reluctance to adopt the right technology at the right moment

Reluctant Technophiles: India’s Complicated Relationship with Technology

Author: Rakesh Kumar

Publisher: Sage

Pages: 324

Price: Rs 595

How is it that people of Indian origin dominate the technology industry in the United States, but India-based technology companies do not figure in any world rankings of technology companies, asks the author.

As examples, he points out that the tech giants of our time, Google and Microsoft are both headed by Indians, so are other tech leaders such as IBM and Adobe. Other Indians helped found and grow other giants such as Sun Microsystems, Bose Corporation and Hotmail. As a contrast, leading India-based giants such as TCS and Tech Mahindra, he says, are part of family-owned business groups.

India, he says, abounds in paradoxes of this kind and that too from time immemorial. Apathy towards adopting a cavalry-based military strategy led to the military defeat in 1192 of Prithviraj Chauhan against Turkic invaders. Robert Clive with his tiny but technologically equipped East India Company army, walked over local rulers in the 1757 Battle of Plassey and set the foundation of British rule in India for the next few hundred years. In each of the cases, a refusal by the Indian side to adopt the key technology of that era was the underlying cause of the Indian side’s defeat, he says.

The author then attempts to figure out the underlying reasons for this reluctance to adopt the right technology at the right moment.

Taking the current era, he points out the Indian business system is dominated by a set of family-owned oligarchies whose success, he says, is dependent on cozying up to the political establishment. So new and upcoming businesses don’t stand a chance against family-based businesses that have mastered that art of cozying up. Is this the reason talented middle-class origin Indian would-be entrepreneurs find their way to the Silicon Valley because they feel they don’t stand a chance of winning against the family-owned oligarchies in India?

Even when the Indian government takes the initiative and leads the way in a rising technological sector, such efforts come to naught. He extensively discusses the case of atomic energy. Homi Bhabha had declared as early as 1958 that nuclear power would take care of India’s power problems in a dozen-odd years. Yet, after spending huge amounts of money, the dream of low-cost power from nuclear sources has not yet been realised.

Another early initiative by the Indian government that also came to naught, he writes, is the computer industry. He describes the efforts of P C Mahalanobis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta in the 1950s and of Lalit Kanodia in sowing the seeds for founding Tata Consultancy Services in the 1960s.  He says we Indians never let these efforts fully flower because of the twin forces working in Indian society: Being allured by the promise of technology as well as giving in to centuries of traditional antagonism towards technology, thus making us “reluctant technophiles”.

Separately, he recounts the innumerable occasions where superstition and technology co-exist comfortably in India: He says that no rocket launch can happen in ISRO when it is Rahu Kalam. Even new projects there, according to him, are never started during Rahu Kalam. He sees an urgency to diagnose and overcome these obstacles to the adoption of new technologies because we are living in an era where the promise of technology is far greater than ever before in history. As examples, he talks of the critical role technology will play in defence: The use of computer software creations such as malware that can launch cyber-attacks to bring down things like the electricity grid of an enemy country. On the positive side, he says, technological innovation can revolutionise healthcare by using technologies like nanomedicine and virtual reality. He also describes the technologies in transport and housing that can make these services affordable for India’s low-income masses.

His key policy recommendations for action to achieve the goal of making India a centre for technological innovation are three-fold. The first deals with public policy to achieve a balanced protectionism for local industry innovators. Too much protection could lead to the “import substitution” era that the country suffered in the 1960s and too little protection could prevent local startups from flowering. The second deals with the role of government intervention in funding research where, again, he points out the pitfalls of too much as well as too little. The third deals with changes needed in the education system. Here, he believes that India’s higher education system (including the IITs — he graduated from one of them) suffers from an unbearable burden. This is the burden of a theory-based education system that has been in force since Sir Alfred Chatterton in the late 19th century was a member of the Indian Industrial Commission of the British Raj. 

Some of these recommendations are likely to be controversial. For instance, he suggests that our vast publicly funded school system be converted into public-private partnerships. This, he believes will improve school quality.

All in all, the author highlights the key issues that stop India from being a world centre of innovation and the history and social issues behind this and, thus, this book should justly be debated in our policy circles.

ajitb@rediffmail.com

The reviewer is an internet entrepreneur