Preface
An insider at inflexion points
In June 2005 I was at Bangalore’s Leela Palace Hotel listening to a group of innovators, narrating their experiences trying to differentiate themselves in the market or to develop a sustainable social impact. I instantly saw tremendous potential for them to work together. What if there was a common ground for innovators to come together to solve problems? What if there was a National Innovation System, an ecosystem of resources provided to build the scale and depth for innovators to solve known national problems. At the time I was an R&D manager at Infosys. I was familiar with the processes of innovation, but I didn’t envisage a book about national innovation ever becoming a gripping account of the change anyone can witness in a lifetime. Since that bright spark at the Leela Hotel, I have changed my role and moved across two countries. The idea has developed into a framework for innovation, a blueprint of sorts, a new way of looking at applying innovation at the national level. I soon realised that nurturing innovation for inclusive growth can become – if designed, prioritised and funded well – a solution for grassroots development, national growth and global competitiveness.
After the Indian economy became an integral part of the world’s social, economic and political system through globalisation, India has benefited immensely. India’s present challenge is to build on the wealth that its open markets have created and share its benefits more equitably. Innovation is central to distributing economic prosperity. Innovation endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. More importantly, innovation is the specific instrument for rural entrepreneurship as well as global competitiveness – therefore India needs to look at innovation as a national priority.
I also realised that such a dispassionate yet personal account of a nation’s overt and covert strides in innovation and resulting economic development would be unique. It would look very different from how Clayton Christensen would look at innovation, how Michael Porter would look at competitiveness, and how Jeffrey Sachs would look at poverty and development. Yet, it would give tremendous insight into how life in India would shape in the next 40 years.
I am a thoroughbred insider. For over a decade I lived in the city that became synonymous with globalisation and outsourcing – Bangalore. I worked for Infosys, the company that helped put Indian IT industry on the world map, the same company that inspired best-selling author and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and shaped the idea of a flat world. Through University, the decade previously, I lived in semi-urban India. I was born in rural India in a hospital that had fewer than 20 beds and where the doctor who delivered me was also my GP and my dentist. In between, I grew up in Africa close to some extremely wealthy, influential and powerful individuals. I saw good and bad governance, feudalism, illiteracy, disease, poverty and gross neglect of fundamental human rights. I saw the similar challenges in India as much as I saw prosperity.
My adolescent years were spent under the Licence Raj prior to 1991, an era where importing a cassette stereo system would have attracted 300 per cent customs duty. But I graduated into a free market, and began participating in the liberalised economy of the 1990s. I belonged to the first generation of engineers who shaped a deregulated India. I saw Indian companies battling red tape, making their carefully studied and calculated strides – each one calling for a celebration. I saw them flourishing, raising capital in international markets, buying companies and funding R&D overseas. I saw my life change along with millions of other Indians.
I had a deep fascination for the change I was witnessing in India as an insider standing at the inflexion points of three waves – the fall of the Licence Raj in the 1990s, the rise of globalisation in the 1990s and 2000s, and the inconspicuous emergence of innovation somewhere around 2007. At the time of writing, I was at a point in India’s 100-year post-independence history that gave me 60 years of hindsight and 40 years of foresight. I was at a vantage point in time like no other. The accounts, ideas and prescriptions developed for laying out a blueprint were closer to base and tangible yet personal and experiential. They differed from those offered from the boardroom, a political rally or a laboratory. So the ideas began to develop five years ago.
Identifying India as a superpower in the making – that too from an innovation point of view – when much of the country’s infrastructure lies in ruins and many still die of preventable diseases, proved to be a challenge for me. At the news that a focused exposition of India’s luminous future was on its way, I received much skepticism. My friends and colleagues in the West, where I now live and work, are unable to reconcile the gap between India’s physical infrastructure and its undoubted mental infrastructure. In their minds, there is a perceived gap between what ought to be done and how things are done in India. Frankly, neither India nor its citizens have laboured to change any of these perceptions. The other group of agnostics were those of Indian origin who have left India decades ago, who unlike my parents, vowed never to look back. Their understandable ignorance of the realities on the ground is apparent at Tandoori barbeques under the summer sun. Discussions can range from the tales on Air India, the only national carrier at one time, or how the telephones didn’t work in the dark ages (a.k.a the 1970s and the 1980s). The third group of skeptics live in India where it is easy to slip into the pessimism that emerges from corruption, apathy, lack of will, helplessness, poverty, disease, social injustice and rampant inequity. Understandably, the vigour with which an old India collides with the new India can have a telling impact on its citizens’ outlook and those watching India from the outside.
In the midst of all these perceptions of current and foregone reality is a billion people, comprising both a rising and affluent middle class, and over 200 million people in extreme poverty. India’s prosperity, which comes from its world-class multinationals, private enterprise and R&D institutions, is weighed down by the country’s massive under-privileged population. For 20–30 per cent of the population the economic impacts of reform remain at a trickle. These agriculture-dependent masses – with limited access to education, technology or free markets – often depend on the monsoon rains for their livelihood. With every failed crop, or monsoon, rural migration chokes India’s cities. Pressure on India’s infrastructure has visibly reached crippling proportions. Indian residents and visitors notice it and talk about it. There is no escaping the fact that rural development is critical, and improving rural GDP has become an imperative. This involves a complex web of issues that need to be understood and dealt with for India to provide equal opportunities for all and to allow a submerged ambition of becoming superpower to surface from within. What would this take?
My purpose here is to attempt to unravel the issues facing the world’s largest democracy, at least peripherally, and to some extent capture the two Indias, colliding more often than collaborating to resolve its own deep-rooted issues. Without losing sight of the realities involved, my aim is to paint the role, to record the subtle trend of innovation-led growth and to lay out a blueprint for innovation while keeping the legacy of the first 60 years of India’s sovereign existence and the opportunities of the next 40 years in perspective. Some have described such a journey as a battle of the mind versus mindsets – or a train chugging five steps forward and two steps backward each time it moves. The good news is that three steps are taken forward. I see the journey more as a ratchet that is moved a few notches backwards to gain leverage for the push forward to turn a complicated wheel of progress.
India’s future lies with its young people. By 2012, a completely new generation of young Indians – born after 1990 – who couldn’t have imagined an India without Pepsi, Nike, the Internet and cable television will have entered the workforce. This generation – globally connected, socially aware, and conscious of its rights and possibilities – will change India. My generation will go down in history for breaking the ground, opening up forbidden business opportunities, mobilising radical entrepreneurial thinking, building lasting Indian corporations, expanding trading bases, acquiring assets in the US, Europe, Latin American and Africa, and setting up the momentum for innovation.
I do not see India progressing without taking its poor with it; the central issue is rural development. With rural development through inclusive innovation, I believe poverty can be tackled universally within a generation. In a country where one in three children drops out of school by the age of 10, I consider it a privilege to be educated in India. I believe the current generation of Indians can eliminate extreme poverty in the country. The next generation will progress it. The future seems bright.
For my father, who was born in British India, the prospects of my generation and of my children’s generation vindicates his struggles that led him to leave the country for opportunities. India’s emergence as a world leader is a lifelong journey transcending three generations. My children may have more opportunity to live and work in a developed India. So this book is also about the life-defining changes that three generations of Indians have experienced and are experiencing in the 100 years following independence.
I have been a keen observer, an analyst of sorts, and often find myself connecting the dots that make the big picture. That desire to add up the numbers, link the stories, a fascination for new ideas, bridled optimism and desire to lend an explanation shaped my career in roles as a researcher, analyst, consultant and journalist (after training in electrical engineering). The cerebral itch to put together these perspectives, perceptions, ideas and diverse experiences is truly the genesis of this book. I hope that this discourse will help mould your view of India, and understand how innovation can define modern India. I hope it will be of help whether you are involved with studies on India, if you are a policy-maker or someone looking to engage with India, or even plan to live, work or do business in India.