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ShareWhat would they do if there are no significant agro-based industries in the villages?
No, no, we shouldn't plan everything in one go. When I tell a farmer that he should not send his son to urban areas, he does not believe me. But once he sees this rise in output, and once you provide the marketing support so that he gets the best rates and is not trapped by this cartel or that, it changes everything. First, the basic aim is to increase his productivity. We are now going to enlarge the experiment. We are willing to share that knowledge.
Getting to information technology, are you satisfied with the place India has carved for itself? Were there missed opportunities?
What have computers done for the country? Almost all software is exported. You have about $50-60 billion in exports and about $10-billion revenues from the indigenous market. Out of that, again, half of the software is from Microsoft, Oracle and others, which you import and sell. So, if you really see, there is hardly any software (made and sold) within the country.
There are 900 million people in India who do not know English. Would you not make them highly productive by making computers and software in Indian languages?
China does not use English, Saudi Arabia does not use English, most of the European countries do not use English. For good reason, we went for exports because when we started TCS, the government did not believe in computers; they thought computers will cause unemployment.
Now the thing is that everybody is making a profit by exporting software and who wants to dirty hands and focus on India? It's not an easy thing to develop software. Our problem is also that we have 22 languages. China has two, Saudi Arabia and other Arabian countries have only Arabic. So software finally has to be made in local languages like the Europeans do. Our states are bigger than many European countries. So you can't even say that everybody should learn one language.
You also want to keep the diversity because it is an asset. So this whole thing we started some years back --- it's a Government of India activity now, with educational institutes and the Pune-based C-DAC, or Centre for Development of Advance Computing. Now we have the operating system and search engine software in 10-12 Indian languages. But the question is, if I have to use software I must have application software. And there are hardly any applications in Indian language. We are looking at it, on how to do it, and trying to rope in educational bodies and all that. But none of the organisations is involved.
Now once these 900 million people become computer-literate, then you need many more PCs than now. Every year now, about 6 million PCs are sold in the country, which are imported or locally assembled. Then you would need 25 million PCs a year. For that kind of number, you would also need an indigenous hardware industry. We should not forget -- it's something which I have been saying from Day One -- that IT is both software and hardware. It's not just software. If you do not have both, there is no growth.
As a people, we do a lot of work that is bright. The focus should also be on "useful" work. The opportunity is going to be a lot more if you think about the whole of India.
The government has been supporting a lot of translation work-related projects. There is a lot of talk on translation from English to local languages. I found a lot of bright Johnnies who have done good work translating from English to local languages but no case in the reverse has happened. Today all lower courts, for instance, work in local languages. It is a huge opportunity to translate the local languages to English.
Even TCS has not focussed on hardware. In fact, your rivals like Wipro and HCL have, and now run a sizeable hardware business...
The reason TCS didn't was because of the government. The Department of Electronics said hardware will be manufactured by Electronics Corporation of India Ltd and Bharat Electronics. It's a countrywide thing and you have to think ahead. It takes as much entrepreneurship as software.
Wipro and HCL did the right thing to have both software and hardware. But how many PCs do they make? Only a few, right? And that, too, they assemble mostly. I am talking of 25 million PCs. If the Wipros, HCLs and Zeniths would have made all the PCs that are required then we would have a significant hardware industry for ourselves.
There was a hardware committee that I chaired in 2001. When I went deeper into it I saw that you need micro-electronics engineers for the hardware industry. At the time India was producing less than 200 of them, while a small country like Israel was producing more than 1,000.
TCS then spoke to IIT Bombay, to professors Dinesh Sharma and Juzer Vasi on how to re-engineer courses in micro-electronics. They did it and handed it over to the ministry of information technology with the request that you run those courses in 100 engineering colleges where they have good physics and engineering departments.
They did it only in 20 colleges due to some constraints. But the thing is in 2008 we produced about 1,000 microelectronics engineers. When we produce 3,000 to 5,000 microelectronics engineers, as my report suggested, then you will become a design leader in the world. Already Intel has got a design centre in Bangalore. Some others also have. Intel is designing its 6-core chip here and not in the US.
