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India 2.0: From service provider to innovator

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Adrian Bridgwater ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 20 Nov 2007 16:43 GMT

...the Yahoo Kids learning and entertainment portal. Made in India in the English language, it has already been localised for both Japan and Korea. Yahoo India has also produced underlying technology developments such as Vertex, a cross-vertical information-extraction platform that scrapes websites and pulls in information from them so that the information is extracted according to a pre-specified schema and stored in a database. In short, it's a quantum leap forward from call-centre work.

How these innovations manifest themselves in reality is a different and harder question to answer. "There are signs of emerging niche technologies emanating from India, such as developments to provide persistent security and network access control, or design work on the next generation of microcontroller chips. However, this is at a relatively early stage and the scale of such exports is still small, but the growth is accelerating much faster than more mature services exports," said Brian Stones, executive vice president of Mumbai-headquartered Patni.

"We are starting to see the creation of technology as a direct revenue generator — not merely as an enabler for making some service delivery faster, better or cheaper. Much of this is still driven by global organisations that originally set up captives to exploit the cost advantages of the Indian skills market, but [which] have graduated to becoming a strategic part of the global technology-development capability of these organisations — truly contributing to the creation of their products and technologies, including product management. For example General Motors R&D in India is developing next-generation electronics and materials for cars of the future," added Stones.

We are starting to see the creation of technology as a direct revenue generator — not merely as an enabler for making some service delivery faster, better or cheaper

Brian Stones, Patni

Of course, growth creates growth and a virtuous circle of proliferating expansion for complementary and supporting technologies is emerging. With an explosive growth of mobile-phone users in India and other parts of Asia, Symbian — which has over 70 percent market share of the smartphone operating-systems market — is working to ensure new units are supported with foundation-level technology. The company's own Bangalore office was opened in 2006 with an initial remit to provide core Symbian OS application technologies and product development to meet customer and product requirements.

Now, with a more fully evolved role within the organisation, Symbian India fits into the company's international operating-system engineering base to provide a research and development unit with specific responsibility for multimedia, networking, messaging, user interfaces and graphics, including significant technical contributions to the company's Posix layer.

"India is certainly witnessing a secondary stage in the economic growth it derives from its technology sector, as it channels its workforce towards home-grown projects targeted at a global market," said Bruce Carney, head of developer programmes and services for Symbian. "In the past month, two leading Indian universities have joined our Academy programme and this type of knowledge-base expansion has created the momentum for venture capitalists to propel further developments and invest in an increasingly skilled workforce."

However, despite this optimistic attitude, the jury is still out on whether there really is a new dawn for Indian IT entrepreneurialism coming. Critics of the Indian technology sector's ability to be inventive and entrepreneurial have accused it of being an "instruction-led" society — that is, workers don't "do" until they're told to "do". Similar negativity has been voiced over the country's big but seemingly shallow labour pool. There are also still enormous divides within Indian society; according to estimates, more than a third of India's population of more than one billion people lives on less than $1 a day.

India wants to be seen as the perfect test bed for technologies suitable for emerging markets, as it is now a "veteran" emerging market itself. With this pedigree and the new streams of investment being channelled into the country's technology sector, it would appear that the rapidly expanding skilled labour pool will be scooped up and put to full use in the India 2.0 world. As to when the country will reach India 3.0, when Western workers migrate to the sub-continent as their location of choice for work, it is hard to say, but it will surely happen.