Video Conference Address At The Valedictory Function Of The Nasscom 2005: India Leadership Forum, Mumbai

Technology leads to Non-Linear business growth

"Small aim is a crime?.

I am indeed delighted to participate in the Valedictory Function of the NASSCOM 2005: India Leadership Forum. I greet all the global leaders from the IT industries, major users of ICT, scientists, technologists, product developers, service providers, distinguished guests and also the silent professionals in the call centres. Call Centres employ a number of visually impaired people. I congratulate the Indian IT Industry for their significant contribution in bringing the country?s software industry to the global arena. NASSCOM 2005, I am sure, will generate lot of interest, which will further enhance exports by the Indian IT industry. The growth in IT business is directly related to how much innovation and research results we continuously inject to invigorate the industry. IT industry equally contributes for the national development through electronic connectivity such as tele-medicine, tele-education and e-governance. I greet all the members who have assembled here and also the international community. I would have loved to come to Mumbai and to meet you and discuss, but I have to be in Delhi, regret for the inconvenience caused.

Growth of Knowledge Society

Economic growth for India is fundamentally tied to societal transformation in the knowledge products and service sector. Of course this in turn strengthens agriculture and manufacturing through innovation and value addition. Our movement towards Developed India 2020 is to generate revenue not only from raw material, agricultural and industrial products which are the hallmarks of an agricultural society. We have to move upwards to an information and knowledge society involving explicit knowledge through knowledge intensive products and have manufacturing sector and high value agriculture based on new knowledge and skill. Information and communication technology have to be widely deployed in our transformation strategy along with newer technologies like Biotechnology, Nano-technology, advanced materials in addition to new approaches of clean technologies.

Changing Pattern of Society

When the world was moving from the industrial to information and knowledge era, we witnessed a changing pattern in the sectoral share of GDP and the number of people employed in each sector. The share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) percentage has undergone a considerable change. Contribution of agriculture to India?s GDP has reduced from 39% to 22% during the period 1979 to 2004. During the same period contribution of manufacturing sector has moved from 24% to 27% and whereas the contribution from the services sector has increased from 37% to 51%, it includes ICT Sector. There has been considerable change in the employment pattern also. The percentage of people employed in agriculture has come down from 64% to 54%. Simultaneously, the percentage of people employed in manufacturing has gone up from 15% to 19% and in the service sector from 20% to 27%. This trend has to continue and by 2020 our employment pattern should aim at 44% in agriculture, 21% in manufacturing and 35% in service sectors. The displacement of 10% people from agriculture sector has to be facilitated through skill enabling for undertaking value added tasks in the rural enterprises so that migration to urban area is reduced. Instead of the person from the rural areas going to urban towns in search of jobs in manufacturing and services sectors, PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) facilitates creation of employment in the rural areas itself. PURA achieves this by providing physical, electronic and knowledge connectivities to a cluster of villages thereby leading to their economic connectivity and prosperity.

Our growth focus in the ICT Sector

Today the software industry in India is nearly 28 billion dollars (USD 18 Billion Export and USD 10 Billion Domestic Market) contributing to nearly 24% of nation's exports. This is through IT Services and ITES-BPO Sector, which accounts for around 3.5 % of the global market. India?s core competence is in the area of IT services, IT Enabled Services (ITES) - Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO). The business volume in these two sectors alone accounts for USD 850 Billion. Our first aim should be to capture at least 15% of the Global business volume in these two sectors, which is expected to be around 1.2 trillion dollars by 2008. The market share of the Indian Software industry in IT Services, ITES, and BPO alone should be around 200 billion dollars by 2008.

I consider this as doable, since our university system is contributing over two million graduates including Engineering graduates every year. This is a vital resource needed for growth in the IT Services, ITES and BPO. Now what is needed is the infrastructural establishment such as IT parks including call centres in large numbers for providing the services which can be established by our cash rich IT Companies and the state governments. We should aim at increasing the knowledge pool to 5 million Indian youth by the year 2008, which will enhance the existing efficiency by the factor of 2. Can the Industry captains assembled here meet this challenge? How do we achieve this? This should be the collective concern of the entire software industry, NASSCOM, user industry associations such as CII, FICCI, Government and Non-government organisations.

Technology Interfaces

Technology is the non-linear tool available to humanity, which can affect fundamental changes in the ground rules of economic competitiveness. Science is linked to technology through applications. Technology is linked to economy and environment through manufacture of knowledge products. Economy and environment are linked to technology, which promotes prosperity to the society. We have to use innovation of knowledge products to generate high value added information technology products for becoming a global player.

Knowledge products for non-linear growth

In January 2005, the Indian IT industry reached a mile stone of having more than one million software professionals employed by the industry. This number continues to grow. I must congratulate the industry for this growth in spite of worldwide reluctance on outsourcing. This shows the unquestionable quality of the Indian software professionals and the fact that India is the best and the ultimate destination for all ICT related activities. It is also heartening to note that not only the number of personnel employed by the ICT industry has gone up, but also the revenue per capita has also increased. However for the country that wants to become the leader in the knowledge era, it is necessary to have revenue per capita almost increased by an order of magnitude. This will also assure you that the Indian ICT moves up the value chain and takes on jobs that are costed more as a total project cost as compared to the projects that are costed on dollar per hour basis.

A typical international software company with 50,000 employees earns over 20 billion dollars through its worldwide operations. I would like to mention here that in this area, one single MNC contributes to over 40 billion-dollar businesses today. That means the per capita yield of Indian knowledge worker is one fourteenth of a similar worker in the developed nation. I suggest that the Governments, Industry and the academia to work together to develop and market intellectual property products which alone can increase the per capita revenue non-linearly for the Indian Software Industries. Hence our software industry has to move up the value chain and come up with innovative products that will have an order of magnitude commercial impact in the international market. I am confident that the Indian IT Industry is capable of undertaking such mega missions.

This knowledge product development is a challenging area such as embedded software, networking software, real time software and integrated software for bio, info and nano. But if we are looking for non-linear growth in future years it is an essential step that the ICT community should venture today with confidence and become a knowledge product community. If the front line IT companies is hesitant to venture in this area, NASSCOM should create consortiums of budding IT companies who can undertake this challenging mission.

Mission of knowledge Products: What is this challenging mission? We need to attain self-reliance in the infrastructural software sector with the knowledge products, where the domain applications can be developed and deployed for the services sector. It is essential to channelise our resources from the industry, academic institutions and research organizations and setting up the incubation centers in collaboration with each other in different parts of the country. These incubation centers will continuously feed the technologies to the industries. The student community is a big resource, the IT industries in their own interest; have to equip the educational institutions to harness the power of the student community. For effective competitiveness with the research results, innovation as said, an effective triangle of industries, researchers from academia, R&D and the student community, it is possible to develop innovative products. The knowledge products in the following domains such as:

1. General Purpose Operating Systems, Real Time Operating Systems through open source initiative.

2. Embedded Operating Systems to run the real time and mission critical applications for the defence, space and aerospace applications.

3. VLSI design, smart card sector with a multifactor authentication mechanism with embedded encryption technology for the National ID Card Initiative.

4. Application Servers framework for middle tier business applications.

5. Relational and Object oriented Database management systems

6. Digital Security Algorithms based on Indian Traditional knowledge through our languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and others, which have unique encryption capabilities.

7. Language independent software is the most immediate need for the country since we are a multi-lingual nation.

These tasks are important for the ICT community for wealth generation. Further, we should make the infrastructural software products compatible to the future technologies namely the nano electronic devices and computers.

In addition to the linear growth in IT services, ITES and BPO sector, which is labour intensive, India should aspire for producing knowledge products as discussed so far. Software products accounts for 260 billion dollars of Global business. At least we should work for a market share of 10% in the beginning. Hence the total market share for India should be 200 plus the additional 26 billion dollars.

Nano electronics and Devices

India had missed the micro electronic bus. Presently nano technology is knocking at our doors. If we take proper investment decisions we can definitely aspire to become leaders in nano technology products especially in the nano electronics area, which is having a market potential of 300 billion dollars.

India should now invest to the tune of 300 million dollars towards the nano science and technology research in partnership with the like minded MNCs for the research, development and volume production of nano electronic devices including nano computers with time bound mission mode programmes. This requires collective efforts between the industry, academic institutions, R&D laboratories and the Government for having integrated development of infrastructure, human resources, product design, manufacturing and marketing. The academic institutions have to gear up for such a challenging mission. I would like to discuss some of the innovations, which have taken place in our laboratories and industry, which I am personally aware of.

Innovation in India

I appreciate the fact that with all the constraints Indian Software industries have developed and marketed the products in the Financial, banking, accounting, CRM, Telecom sectors etc. Now, I would like to give few examples to demonstrate how we can improve our productivity through the creation and promotion of innovative knowledge products for the wealth generation in the ICT sector.

CAD/CAM and Virtual Reality Products: The effective application of composites in system design has a significant impact on a company's ability to be successful. Efficient design and manufacture of composite parts is substantially a "black art", requiring the application of experienced engineers in many specialized disciplines. This normally yields long design and manufacture cycle times, which put composite components on the "critical path". The industry is in need of software tools, which will automate the creation of engineering data required to drive the manufacturing process. Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), Bangalore, with many years of experience in composites design and manufacture, has developed a Design for Manufacture software called Autolay. This knowledge product in the CAE domain has been sold to number of foreign aerospace industries including Airbus. Presently, it is being marketed by Infosys and further into the development to suit the customer needs. It took 60-70 man-years for the development in India.

Like this, ADA had developed an indigenous product called PRANA in the Virtual Reality domain. PRANA is an enterprise wide visualization Software, which brings visual simulation technology to product design and manufacturing teams. It is a tool to make digital Mock-ups a reality. ADA has also developed GITA ? Graphical Interactive Three Dimensional Application for CAD/CAM Design and is being used by number of small-scale industries in India and educational institutions. These are the spin off technologies of LCA Programme. What is needed is a collaborative effort between ADA/DRDO, Academia and the Software Industries to promote the products, develop further and market it competitively in the national and international market.

This is a single example I am giving about one establishment. Similarly ISRO has contributed in designing software for validating the total software of launch systems, Atomic Energy has developed software for high pressure systems and Missile teams have developed software for non-linear control systems design.

Tele-education Delivery System: I would like to narrate my experience in the development of a Tele-education delivery system. I had a dream; a good mathematics teacher teaching mathematics in a remote village like Chandipur school in Orissa, should be able to teach number of schools located in different parts of the country including Konkan villages in Maharashtra, interact with the students in sequence and be able to clarify the doubts. Also the teacher must be able to draw the knowledge from various sources on the fly, such as internet, digital library, generated creative content and the lectures given by various experts in the same field and deliver to all the students as if they are in the same simulated class room in a cost effective manner. I have shared these thoughts in number of forums as well as I have told number of software industry leaders in India. I am happy to mention that a young team interacted with me during the year 2001 and based on this concept, this team has designed and developed a unique tele-education delivery system in collaboration with the Private IT industry.

This universal tele-education delivery system works via heterogeneous network platform through IP protocol. It provides virtual classrooms in a multi class and studio environment with seamless two-way interaction between the teachers and students in a collaborative framework. It provides seamless, one-to-one, one-to-many connectivity, through the broadcasting network in a multicasting mode of delivery. It seamlessly enables a remote teacher to become a teacher to all the students in a session. Unlike the other video conferencing systems and multimedia tools currently in use for tele-education purposes, this Interactive Universal Tele-education delivery system creates a virtual classroom. It enables the teacher to take the student to a live virtual tour of the subject. This provides a cost effective solution for interactive content delivery. In a comparative basis we can create 250 nodes tele-education system for interactive delivery at a cost of establishing 4 multi-station video conferencing systems. Recently I addressed five colleges in different parts of Punjab as a part of Distance Education Programme. I referred in my classroom the subject what I was teaching, relevant Digital Library reference, a page from book reference and my talk on delivered during an international conference on e-governance through my website. I could see all the class students from various locations. They can also see me and interact with me. The whole system has been developed by one of my young fellow, Shri V. Ponraj and his team at various locations of the country. He works with me.

Single window Smart media Convergent System (SMCS)

In India, unlike in many developed countries, the Internet penetration is much lower than the PC penetration, PC penetration is much lower than the Phone penetration, and phone penetration islower than the TV penetration. Though the cost of TV and the PC are comparable, one prefers to invest on TV than the PC since people find much larger utility for the TV for entertainment. Imagine the amount of information a villager gets for about Rs 200 a month- nearly 70 channels, more than 6 MHz per channel - nearly like a PC with lesser bandwidth in single direction. Hence, the liking for TV is all pervasive.

Hence, a smart media, which becomes a single window, a single device that combines the functionality of TV, VCR, PC, Internet and Telephone, all at the cost of a TV may be required. Such a device has already been developed by Carnegie Mellon University in association with IISc and Private Global IT industries. The Indian industry must take it further to meet the Global market.

Conclusion: Indomitable spirit

When you have a mission to become great leaders in ICT and Knowledge systems, who can change the competitiveness index of every nation, I would like to share with you the need for possessing an important factor for success in your mission. That is indomitable spirit for achieving the mission.

Let us study the characteristics of indomitable spirit. It has two components. The first component is that there must be a Vision leading to higher goals of achievement. I would like to recall a couplet from Thirukkural by the Poet Saint Thiruvalluvar written 2500 years ago.

It means that whatever may be the depth of the river or lake or pond, whatever may be the condition of the water, the Lilly flower always comes out and blossoms. Similarly, if there is a definite determination to achieve a goal even if it is impossible to achieve, the man succeeds.

Many of us have gone through large programmes and projects. We would have experienced that success is not in sight and there are many hurdles. The same poet reminds us at this point of time through another couplet:

We should never be defeated by any problems. We should become master of the situation and defeat the problems. I consider these two Thirukkurals characterize the indomitable spirit. Such a spirit is crucial to improve competitiveness of institutions, which can develop great human resources for adding value and generating wealth to the nation.

I wish all of you to succeed in your mission of increasing the Indian market share of IT Services, ITES and BPO to $ 200 Billion and $ 25 Billion in the Software Products sector of the global market within the next four years.

May God bless you.

Questions and Answers Session

1. You have set a target of India being a developed country by 2020. How do you define ?developed?? And what role do you see for IT in this, especially in ensuring economic development in the rural areas of our country?

- Kiran Karnik, President, NASSCOM

Ans.The country has 260 million people living below the poverty line. When it is developed we do not expect anybody to be below the poverty line. For achieving this we have to increase our GDP growth from the existing 6 to 7% annually to 10% consistently for a period of ten years. We have a road map for realizing this which needs simultaneous action on five areas such as: agriculture and agro-processing, education and healthcare, ICT, infrastructure development including reliable power, water and transportation and self-reliance in critical technologies. The ICT sector has to embark on tele-education, tele-medicine, e-governance, e-commerce for promoting balanced economic growth in the rural sector. One concept which I have propagated in my Republic Day address is the creation of village knowledge centres in all Panchayat. When ICT contributes to more than 25% of not merely our exports but to our entire GDP, we would become a developed nation.

2. What role should industry play in bridging the ?digital divide??

- Saurabh Srivastava, Xansa

Ans. We need to create language independent software for application in all our village knowledge centres. Also the industry should create ICT enterprises in rural areas.

3. In your opinion, what steps do we require to take the lead in leveraging innovation to address the challenges we face as a society?

- Ganesh Natrajan, Zensar

Ans. In a competitive world innovation is the key to face competition leading to wealth generation in a nation. Innovation is driven by the competitiveness of the market. Innovation can be fostered by a very good knowledge base backed up by high quality educational system. The educational system that we had been emphasizing for some time includes the component of entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur and the venture capitalist together take this innovation to the industry and convert it into a value added product. NASSCOM could encourage many industries to come together as consortium, combine the complementary talents, innovations and portfolios to create world class products. This is essential for leveraging innovation to create non-linear growth and create many more Indian MNCs.

4. How do we ensure the input and involvement of the private sector in major national programmes? From your own experience in bringing industry in major programmes of space and defence, what steps would you recommend in bringing about a public-private partnership?

- Ashank Desai, Mastek.

Ans. Today if you see, the IT industry there is no major industry in the public sector. The ministry is executing all the programmes only through private sector participation. Hence, there is a healthy partnership already existing between the government and the industry for promoting ICT towards sustainable national development.

5. No country has become developed without leadership in science and technology? Are we doing enough? What measures would you suggest?

- Bob Hoekstra, Philips Software.

Ans. The developed India mission has to be realized only through the application of science and technology in all sectors of our economy. We are working towards a knowledge society. The knowledge realized has to be fed back to manufacturing and agriculture sector to realize the benefit of application of science and technology towards national growth. We had creative and visionary leaders like Vikram Sharabhai and Prof. Satish Dhawan. Vikram Sharabhai had a vision to foresee the entire space programme. Prof. Satish Dhawan had given a new dimension to management of science in this country.

6. Do you believe that as a country we are not spending enough on building our defence capabilities? If so, why? And what role can industry play in doing this?

- Jerry Rao, Mphasis

Ans. Our spending is adequate for meeting the defence needs of our nation. The industry has to play a major role in production of defence equipment so that the nation can get cost effective products and better value for money.

7. We pride ourselves on being the world?s largest democracy. While we have the right to vote and freedom of speech, do you think we are doing enough to ensure accountability & transparency in running public institutions? How do we bridge this gap?

- Atul Nishar, Hexaware Technologies Ltd.

Ans. Ours is a democracy which is nearly five decades old. Continuously there is an effort to improve our systems and processes. In many areas ICT has been applied to improve governance. Progressively this will bring forth transparency and accountability in all our operations.

8. What would you like the IT industry to do in order to address the urgent need of bridging the gaps in our education system?

- BVR Mohan Reddy, Infotech Enterprises.

Ans. One of the important areas in education is shortage of good teachers in our rural sector. This problem can be overcome through the use of tele-education where the lectures by a good teacher can be heard by students located in remote areas. I would suggest that the IT industry participate in a big way in promoting tele-education in our remote rural areas.