We are bringing back the much-needed focus on start-ups. This is the single most positive and important takeaway that has emerged from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the Silicon Valley in the USA and conferring with corporate leaders of software and hardware giants in San Jose. There was nothing wrong in the Prime Minister’s pro-actively engaging the IT czars.
Silicon Valley is all about start-ups and every story there is about entrepreneurs who have made their name and fame in the last 30-40 years. They are all bright and their successes have come laced with failures. This is one big difference between India and the US. Here, in our tradition, we reject failures, but in Silicon Valley failure is accepted. That is how Silicon Valley has been all about stories of great successes and failures.
While India has been traditionally good in delivering software services, we are not strong on products, like Microsoft or Apple. This calls for changing the pace of energising start-ups in India based on products. This (trip) would also lay the foundations for the greatest bandwidth connectivity in the country. You should go pan-India and it requires lot of money.
It is not the nation’s wealth that should create connectivity, but rather connectivity should create the nation’s wealth. So, we expect that the gap between the spoken word and the action on the ground on these aspects would be minimised if not totally eliminated after this visit of the Prime Minister. And once the ‘bankruptcy policy’ is in place, investors would also have a measure of protection that should help in bringing back the much-needed focus on start-ups as Silicon Valley is all about that.
The other thing is about the Prime Minister’s visit to Tesla Motors, founded in 2003 by a group of engineers in the Silicon Valley to prove the efficacy of electric cars over gasoline-driven cars. I hope this would energise somebody to come in here and create something of value, create a cost-effective individual transportation model. So the Silicon Valley visit by the Prime Minister should have long-term spin-offs too for jobs and wealth creation.
I believe the biggest message from the Modi visit is that the time has come to encourage a small group of students who come out of our IITs’ every year to become entrepreneurs. You must have a system of an ‘Innovation Fund’ in place that will ensure that a select group, a small basket of IIT graduates selected for the purpose, is guaranteed a decent pay cheque every month so that they can in turn with their project ideas create value, create new entrepreneurs and new products.
The tragedy in India is we have failed to create opportunities for our brightest minds and then complain about brain drain. We are not making the IITs do the mission for which they were set up in the first place - to innovate and create entrepreneurship even while addressing societal problems. As a former student of IIT-Madras, I am proud I am back here creating value. I have about 1,000 people working for us (for Trigyn Technologies Ltd) in the US and my brother is an innovator himself.
For every decade, we need to have a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs coming out, just as you need a Dhirubhai Ambani for every decade. Look at how C-DOT (Centre for Development of Tele matics) came and it changed the entire telecom scenario in India. We need a model like that at a wider level.
A visit such as this one by the PM can never have anything negative about it. The general goodwill that it creates sets the stage for creating lot of links between the people of both the countries and the entities people work for (on both sides). People-to-people interaction should go up. As to why a Prime Minister at his level should be interacting with top corporate honchos, that is only a matter of perception. The Japanese Prime Minister, Korean PM, British PM and the US President are doing it all the time. My counter question is why did we delay this so long?
(R Ganapathi, veteran software industry expert and IIT-Madras alumnus has for the past 30 years been steering the fortunes of 'Trigyn Technologies Ltd.', a leading IT software solutions company with a significant global presence and a listed company on BSE and NSE)
(As told to M.R. Venkatesh)
