On India as an Emerging Knowledge Hub

This special issue, commemorating 50 years of computing in
India, is as much an occasion to look forward as to look back. The IT software
and services sector now employs over 1.3 mn, and is the nation's largest
exporter. With exports growing robustly at over 30% a year, the target of $60 bn
in 2010 is within reach. However, while this may be impressive, it is but a
minor fraction (less than a twentieth) of the overall worldwide market.

India already dominates the global off-shoring scene, with a
market share greater than the sum of all the other offshore destinations. In
years to come, the capabilities of Indian IT will certainly make it an important
player, particularly in many newer areas: engineering services, animation,
e-games, embedded systems, software products, and e-Governance. In animation and
e-game the challenge — and opportunity — is to go beyond outsourced
production to the creation and ownership of intellectual property.

Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom

Embedded systems and engineering services are at the cusp of
software and hardware. With the growing improvement in the overall environment
for manufacturing and the increasingly important role played by software, India
could become a hub for such knowledge-intensive manufacturing. While the greater
part of the value will be in software, the scale of manufacturing would help in
creating larger employment.

The future is all about confluence and convergence; not only of
hardware and software, as mentioned, but also between domain knowledge and IT
(taking further the concept of KPO), entertainment and IT (animation and
e-games), communication and IT (remote infrastructure management, single-chip
cellphones). India could, with a decade of intensive effort, be a leader in
areas of confluence like nano-electronics, quantum computers and bio-
technology. The growing possibilities inherent in the interface between
biological systems and IT offer unlimited opportunities in areas like
health-care systems, implants, tele-health, etc. India's needs in this area
— particularly providing health-care services to populations that do not have
easy access to hospitals and doctors — are, in many ways, similar to the
problem of far wealthier home-bound people in developed countries. Here also,
integration of software and hardware plays a greater role to enhance country's
development.

However, there are serious challenges to be overcome-particularly
in the area of human resources. Quantity, quality, innovation and
entrepreneurship need to be ensured. In this too, IT may play an important role:
extending the reach and quality of education through distance-learning,
accelerating the pace and increasing the depth of learning, freeing the teacher
from routine tasks and providing large-scale peer-level interaction. IT in
education can be as important as IT in health.

India is on the verge of being in IT what Japan is in
automobiles or China in white goods or Saudi Arabia is in oil. While the
bread-and-butter role of conventional IT services (applications maintenance and
development, etc.) will continue, an evolution to IP creation and IT as a tool
or input into larger systems/solutions will make India a true knowledge hub.
India created the onshore-offshore model for IT services and pioneered offshore
BPO. In the coming years, it is now poised to create new rule-changing and
role-changing models. This evolution — towards setting standards rather than
meeting them, making the rules of the game (even creating an altogether new
game) rather than merely playing by them, inventing new roles rather than
fitting into a given one — is what we should aim for, not the high-sounding
but empty title of "IT superpower".

(The views expressed by the author are personal).