The employment figures of multinational corporations in India tell their own story. By December 2007, Accenture should have more employees in India than in the United States, its headquarters. In the last fifteen years, IBM has increased its Indian workforce by 52,000 while reducing its American employees by 31,000. When Citigroup recently announced major job cuts in the States, its 22,000 Indian staff were unaffected, and if anything are likely to increase. The proportion of these companies’ workforces in India as a percentage of their global labor pool is going up steadily. As technology advances, there's almost no limit to the kind of work that can be outsourced, and India is in the prime position to pick up the offerings. Today, as long as you have the fiber-optic cables and the bandwidth to communicate with the other side of the globe, geography is merely a circumstance, not a determining factor.
This is a welcome development, but we shouldn't be content with it. The next stage must be for Indians to develop such services for our own market. Doing outsourced work for the United States and Europe is all very well, but there's a lot more we could be doing for India and Indians, too. The skills we are able to market for foreign employers can also be turned toward improving the prospects of our fellow citizens — finding solutions for the problems of Indians and not just Americans or Brits. Perhaps the next level of outsourcing will come when smart scientists in Bangalore farm out processes to young engineers in Dharwar to cater to the needs of consumers in Hubli.
58. Looking to the Future with Brand IIT
FEW SUBJECTS WARRANT AS OPTIMISTIC A LOOK TO THE FUTURE as Indian science and technology. Living as I am these days in the United States, I have had the particular pleasure of seeing some of the prospects firsthand, having been asked to address a global gathering of IIT alumni in Mumbai just before Christmas 2006.
Demographic projections suggest that the next U.S. census will find more Indian Americans than American Indians. When I was admitted to an American graduate school in 1975, not too many history majors were making the journey to America. Already, though, our counterparts at India's elite technological universities and engineering colleges — especially those from the Indian Institutes of Technology or IITs — had begun to snap up the fellowships that American munificence provided. They went on to form the creative backbone of the global information revolution with their quick minds and developed crucial innovations that changed the way Americans live.
IITians dominate what Americans call the “honor roll.” Arun Netravali, former president of Bell Laboratories, received the Presidential Medal of Technology for pioneering the technology that enabled high-definition television, HDTV, and Internet streaming videos. Raj and Neera Singh, an entrepreneurial couple, pioneered the use of cell phone and pager technology in forty countries. Mohamed Zaidi, as president of Alcoa in Germany, pioneered the first aluminum-based automobiles for various models of Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volvo, and Porsche. Dr. Mani Bhaumik invented the cold laser technique, which is used for laser eye-surgery machines and has benefited over fifteen million patients worldwide. Padma Warrior as CTO of Motorola is creating more affordable mobile phones for the Indian rural markets. (These stars and many more—101 global IITians in all — are featured in a book by IIT alumnus Ranjan Pant, published in 2007.)
The success of these IITians and several thousand more transformed the image of their homeland and its people. To the American mind, the stereotypical Indian is no longer a snake charmer but a software guru. Today an Indian student with decent grades has a better than ever chance of admission to an American university of his or her choice, with a substantial scholarship. This blossoming of the Indian diaspora has happened because of seeds sown decades ago by the founders of great institutions like the IITs.
When I wrote my short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Invention of India), I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for India today.
Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research. They and their successors have given India a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world.
Nehru's establishment of the IITs (and the spur they provided to other institutions like Birla Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management) have produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 corporations. Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the United States as one from MIT or Caltech. The next step is for IITians in India and IITians abroad to strengthen their bonds and combine their intellectual talents, resources, and skills to help each other expand into one another's markets.
One can imagine IIT alumni abroad enhancing opportunities for their businesses by partnering with Indian companies led by IITians, and vice versa. Such “IIT alumni to IIT alumni trade” could apply to many industries and even to higher education, where IIT alumni professors from Indian institutions and those attending from abroad can plan to exchange students and faculty and collaborate across borders on research.
India's extraordinary emergence in new industries — software, information technology, and business process outsourcing — is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education. Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.
His legacy is not one we can afford to be complacent about. After all, the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru. The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together twenty-four centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head. The Vedic civilization subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat.
And yet we lost the global lead in science and technology for over a millennium. It is time to resolve that we will never allow ourselves to slip behind again. That will require resources — serious money for research, world-class lab facilities. But above all, it will require one commodity India is not short of — brains (and the determination to use them).
“Brand IIT” has shown the way. We must start to scale this up to the point where one day “Brand India” becomes synonymous not with cheap products or services but with the highest standards of scientific and technological excellence.
59. India and Soft Power
POWER,” WROTE HARVARD'S JOSEPH NYE, “is the ability to alter the behavior of others to get what you want, and there are three ways to do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots), and attraction (soft power). If you are able to attract others, you can economize on the sticks and carrots.”
It is increasingly axiomatic today that the old calculations of “hard power” are no longer sufficient to guide a country's conduct in world affairs. Informed knowledge about external threats to the nation, the fight against terrorism, a country's strategic outreach, its geopolitically derived sense of its national interest, and the way in which it articulates and projects its presence on the international stage, are all intertwined, and are also conjoined with its internal dynamics. There can no longer be a foolproof separation of information management from policymaking, of external intelligence and internal reality, of foreign policy and domestic culture. A country's role on the world stage is seen more and more as a reflection of its society.