The Missing Cradle Of Innovation
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will soon be visiting
Silicon Valley, the first Indian prime minister since Nehru to visit California,
or indeed the west coast of America.
Going to a part of the country where India is, in
reality, pretty remote to folks who are not ethnically South Asian, is fairly
bold. California is mostly untroubled by and distant from the nuances of geopolitics
that Washington DC specialises in, but is quintessentially American
nevertheless. Though people seem laid back, productivity has not suffered.
Silicon Valley has spawned some of the
US’s biggest multi-billion dollar corporations, all the more remarkable for
having emerged out of the proverbial ‘garage start-up’.
In Silicon Valley-ethnic Indians, from India, as
opposed to people who ceremonially wear feathered headdresses, have
distinguished themselves. Indians have actually done so in many fields in the
US, doctoring, politicking, business, academics, management, finance, but most
noticeably in what people call that high-growth digital technology ‘incubator’.
This fact needs to be contrasted with the recent
observation of Mr.Narayana Murthy, lead founder of the iconic IT company Infosys, that regrettably, not a
single game-changing innovation, invention, or discovery, has come from India
in the 69 years since independence.
To conclude that this is not due to the intellectual
dullness of the Indian people is entirely reasonable, because Silicon Valley
would probably not be what it is, without its Indian contingent. So, it must be
a matter of atmosphere, style of education, opportunity, and encouragement, at
one level, and financial incentive in the millions and billions of dollars, at
another.
Silicon Valley has made scores of millionaires and
billionaires out of very young people on the strength of their ideas, ramping
them up swiftly, often within a single year, to multiple applications, assisted
by a highly appreciative and savvy venture capital scenario, magnified manifold
by a dynamic stock market. This, besides the NYSE, even has a separate listing
vehicle and index of its own, namely NASDAQ, also in New York.
While the US is renowned for its high academic
standards in its Ivy League colleges, other academic/research institutions, and
some of the leading state run universities; Silicon Valley is populated by a
large number of brilliant college drop-outs. But these are obviously people,
iconoclasts perhaps, but with the vision to create game-changers and
breakthroughs.
That collectively they have succeeded in making a
massive global impact is a tribute to the spirit of American ingenuity,
embedded no doubt in the very air and water and can-do culture of the country.
It is this that has seen America surge ahead of the world in practically every
field of endeavour.
Many of the Nobel laureates who are ethnic Indians,
owe it to the time they have spent living and working in America. India, on its
part, quite often, has educated these very same achievers through school and
college and even post graduate levels, in its IITs and IIMs. But their best
abilities have not flowered at home but ‘over there’.
So what can we do about it, to address Narayana
Murthy’s implied question?
Probably not a lot, at least while we resident
Indians are in transition, both with regard to our attitudes, our lack of
original thinking, and our economic circumstances. In broad terms, we are both
the ‘argumentative’ individualists we are, per Nobel laureate and welfare
economist Amartya Sen, and slavishly conformist and hierarchical at the same
time; based perhaps on our social organisation and history.
This is beginning to change amongst the youth most
definitely, aspirational as they are and unburdened by our socialist history.
That young people now constitute 65% of the population in India will certainly
provoke a gain in momentum as the time goes on.
But the fact is, at the same time, that there is
little or no social security, as it is understood in the West. There is no economic
safety net, except perhaps at the subsistence level, that too most imperfectly.
This circumstance breeds conformity, even fear, certainly not innovation,
except amongst the stoutest of hearts.
On top of this, despite multiple methods of
calculating what constitutes dire straits, more than 50% of our people are
under pressure to just make a day-to-day living. The oft touted statistic of
between 50 -60% of our population that lives in the rural areas and contributes
only a modest 16-17% to the GDP, is crying out for urgent reorganisation –
because, our countryside is spectacularly over-populated and under-productive.
Out of 1.27 billion people today, no more than 1%
are rich, comparable to the rich anywhere, and no more than 5% inclusive,
belong to the upper middle class, with standards of living as good as, if not
better, than their counterparts in the West.
Yet at the same time, with some 15 to 20 million new
births every year, usually at the bottom of the pyramid, the struggling 50% of
the population that includes the lower middle class, can, and do, afford
servants in this country. This certainly eases our day to day burdens of
drudgery, even as it continues to promote the dictation of the traditionalist
in our psyches. However, many of us would not be keen to trade in our daily
privileges, inequitable as they might be, for a more self-reliant set up.
Traditionalists however, a nation full of them, cannot
generally innovate. Our only hope to become here, at home, what we are in so
distinguished a manner abroad, is to challenge our own systems and assumptions.
We cannot do this without pain, both felt, and inflicted and so, the reluctance
to sally forth, is understandable.
As a multi-lingual collective, in a country that is
sub-continental in its pluralism and diversity, we probably cannot muster the
coherence, discipline and determination. This, despite several movements like
the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj, both induced perhaps by the Anglican
Church in British times. They, and other reformist movements, from time to
time, have achieved some limited success in changing attitudes, manners and
mores, to be sure, but clearly not enough.
But there is hope, about that which seemingly cannot
come about as a social movement, might well be brought about politically, by
the power of the ballot and by a visionary government that radically changes
the situation on the ground.
The Modi government has been promising much. It has
plans to get rid of the babu’s files with digitisation. It wants to reform
agriculture towards much greater productivity, and supported by a distribution
and materials handling backbone. Smart cities will be built and millions are
expected to be housed in them. A massive defense industry is in the process of
being built from scratch. Other infrastructure in power, ports, roads, green
energy, nuclear power, modern mining, and so on, are being created.
The intentions of this government, if brought to
fruition, are indeed capable of changing the status quo beyond recognition. Of
course, the vision must sustain the slings and arrows of vested interests that
would destroy it, and the people must afford it the time to execute it. This government will need much more than the
five years of the current mandate. It will need to stretch into a decade or
more, and others that come after it, have to carry the process forward.
But, if all this happens, will be capable
domestically of the game- changing
innovation that Narayana Murthy spoke of? Logically extrapolating on the unleashing of spirit, and possibilities it
will bring about, as the American expression goes: ‘You bet!’
For: Swarajyamag
(1,243 words)
July 27th, 2015
Gautam Mukherjee
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