‘Retirement’ is an alien word for Faqir Chand Kohli, 85, the founder of Tata Consultancy Services. It’s been 10 years since he relinquished the vice-chairmanship of India’s largest software company. But the granddaddy of Indian outsourcing is not just about bits and bytes.
Kohli chaired a committee that, way back in 2001, asked the government to take steps to introduce 4G telephony. Seated in his modest ‘office’ on the 11th floor of Air India building, the old headquarters of the company at Nariman Point, Mumbai, Kohli shared his excellent insights on a host of developmental and educational issues with DNAExcerpts:
What keeps you occupied these days?
What keeps me going are issues especially in education, computerisation across the country and thinking up on how India can do better in hardware. We are also exploring why India cannot do better in agriculture. Simply, there is very little application of science and technology in our agricultural set up. The whole thing started with our Agriculture Consultancy Management Foundation, which is headed by a senior journalist S Vishwanathan (former editor and publisher of Industrial Economist) out of Chennai.
Agriculture productivity in California is six times India’s. China is doing much better than us. We need soil, sun and water for agriculture. We already have more of all of those than most countries. Then why is our productivity so low?
Why is it?
It’s simple. Look at the number of graduates India produces — it’s 3 million a year. About 450,000 of these are engineers, 600,000-odd commerce grads and 1.1 million from humanities. Now we have 95 agricultural colleges and 15 agricultural engineering colleges. Where do all the fellows go? They are not in the villages. They are not in agriculture. Clearly, we are not interested in what happens to what we produce. Let me go back some years. Laksh Lakshmanan of California Agriculture Consulting Service in Davis County, California joined me, as did the University of Wisconsin in a discussion. We said something has to be done about this. Let us start some experiments. Then Balaji Farms, which is located 20 kms outside Chennai, gave us a couple of acres of land to conduct our work.
When did they give it?
About 2 years ago.
To go back to your argument on science and technology not being applied to agriculture, how did we have the Green Revolution, then?
True, but the Green Revolution happened 40 years ago and that had more to do with seeds. What has happened after that? We have just not been able to take agricultural sciences to rural areas properly. That is the problem. If not, then why do you need 95 colleges?
So tell us about your experiments…
We carried out extensive soil testing in the land that Balaji Farms provided us. We were surprised the soil was good. But the soil does not need as much fertiliser as you normally put. It needs supplements like sodium, potassium, zinc and magnesium, which are necessary for plant growth. Secondly, we found that in California they till the land two feet or even 30 inches down. Here (in India) when we had wooden ploughs we tilled about two to three inches. Then came tractors with which you went six inches. We looked at how to go deeper into the soil. I spoke to Anand Mahindra and he sent some people.
They modified the Mahindra & Mahindra tractors in such a way that we could go down 15 inches. So we deposited the seeds 15 inches below the soil and then we deposited fertilisers and supplements about 6 inches below the ground level, not just spread it. And we also did water management. We ensured that water does not spread all over the place. You get the water to the place where it will make the most difference. That is to the plants and their roots.
It’s like drip irrigation but is a bit expensive. It was a brilliant idea by Lakshmanan. He said between seedlings you create a mound of earth. Make it about 15 inches tall. You put a drain through it. There was nothing else to be done. Keep it filled with water. No pressure. Then take plastic pipes and siphon the water right to the roots. We also did de-weeding. The net result was that when the first crop came we got 3,100 kgs of corn against 700 kgs earlier. And we got 1,100 kgs of sunflower against 300 kgs earlier. That was our proof: science and technology was just not applied appropriately in agriculture.
Did you speak to government authorities on this?
We spoke to the Planning Commission. We have spoken to the government to run 100 such prototypes, to encourage putting soil-testing labs all over the country, and also do something on water management and fertilisers. The whole idea is to transfer it to the countryside. Once you do that, two things will happen. One is that if there is four-five times more productivity, and you manage the water well, then you can thrive even during times of water shortage.
Secondly, if the income of a farmer goes up 4-5 times, there is no reason why he should migrate to the cities. Third, which, is my point of view as a technocrat, is that villages would then be able to employ agriculture graduates.
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