Kautilya: Jalan needs to Start Worrying

India Today
October 26, 1998

KAUTILYA
Net Some Savvy

Hi-tech luddites: what do they know of IT who only IT know?

Jairam Ramesh

Five years ago, while speaking at a seminar on employment in Calcutta, Kautilya remarked that there is a great fascination with computer chips in this country but what will create more jobs and add more local value are potato chips. This, Kautilya thought, was a colourful way of saying that it is not the development of hi-tech but IT s use and diffusion that counts. But Ashok Mitra, former finance minister of West Bengal and now an MP, was not amused. He took Kautilya to task for this blasphemy in an article in a national daily. Not content with that, Mitra summoned Kautilya before Parliament's Standing Committee on Industry, of which he was chairman.

Subsequently, the swadeshi brigade turned the quip around and declared: potato chips, no; computer chips, yes. Kautilya cannot help recalling this, not to belatedly claim copyright but to place the current hype over information technology (IT) in its proper perspective.

It was Rajiv Gandhi who ushered India into the information age. He was criticised by today's IT champions as being elitist and not in tune with "Indian realities". Rajiv took the first steps to overhaul our policies in the telecom, electronics and computer industries. But unlike the present lot, he was concerned primarily with the application of IT . He launched the technology mission to use satellites to locate water sources in hard-rock villages. He started the computerisation of railway reservations, a project that now brings convenience to over half a million passengers daily.

Sam Pitroda was Rajiv's IT charioteer. At a time when telecom planners were obsessed with increasing telecom density -- the number of telephones per 1,000 people -- Pitroda stressed improvements in telecom accessibility. The result is public call offices (PCOs) have now become ubiquitous. At a time when people were unaware of our IT potential, Pitroda took steps to entice global companies to use India as a software base. GE was the first major company to do so.

Pitroda also helped establish the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Pune. It has been in the news for developing India's first supercomputer. One of Pitroda's pet projects -- which unfortunately didn't take off but has the potential to transform rural India -- is the application of IT in revenue administration and modernising land records.

IT is not an end in itself. When the prime minister met his Industry and Trade Council recently, he asked Parvinder Singh of Ranbaxy to prepare a blueprint for knowledge-based industries. This is the wrong approach. The real challenge is to apply knowledge-based techniques in all industries. So-called sunset industries like steel and textiles are being transformed by the use of sunrise and knowledge-based technologies. Productivity in the world oil industry has increased by 20 per cent due to IT use. IT can revolutionise our education and literacy programmes. But such public domain applications lack influential and aggressive champions. The IT industry too has shied away.

Kautilya cannot help wondering about the social roots of our obsession with IT at the cost of other critical industries like textiles and agro-processing. The progeny of many of India's ruling elite are working for the Intels, Microsofts, Oracles, IBMs and HPs. Silicon Valley is one of the largest agraharams (Brahmin ghettos) in the world. Is that why the IT industry draws policy attention and not, say, the edible oil milling industry -- which is bigger and employs more Indians?

IT is crucial for India's future. But we must maintain a sense of balance. IT is fundamentally a tool for decentralisaion and empowerment but can very easily degenerate into an Orwellian tool of control and centralisation. Kenneth Keniston, a professor at MIT and keen student of India's IT , points to the rise of a new ruling class: the "digirati". He identifies India's key IT challenge as the localisation of software to Indian languages. According to him, the Chinese are far ahead of India in this area. Keniston says he is struck by the radically different and incompatible approaches to localisation in this country.

The Government's high-profile IT task force has been fixated on fiscal incentives. What is needed is a national information infrastructure, an intra-India Internet as IT were. Ajay Shah, a young Mumbai-based engineer and economist, has worked out the configuration of this infrastructure in great detail. He has published his blueprint in the Economic and Political Weekly, a journal that, alas, the IT types and globalisers don't read.

Shah proposes Indianet as a purely public service and wholesale vendor of bandwidth in units of two million bits per second. The key to expanded domestic connectivity is a change in telecom policy. For instance, interconnections between networks are prohibited. For IT s part, the Indian IT industry will need to move away from selling gadgets to offering solutions. It will also need a whole new approach to retailing and marketing if IT is to transit from being an outpost of the US economy to being an agent of change in India.

The author is secretary of the AICC's Economic Affairs Department. The views expressed here are his own.

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