The Big B and the 2001 mantra

If

New Delhi’s December was relatively warm and fog-free, new year’s day made

up for it with a vengeance. Here was teamwork: nature and man working in synergy

to a common goal. There were clouds, rain, fog, and then the biggest failure of

the northern grid in recent history, plunging North India into darkness for over

12 hours. Our publishing headquarters, in infrastructure-challenged Gurgaon,

went without power for two days from December 31. (We didn’t notice, because

we do not have unreasonable expectations of basic services like electricity,

telecom, water and transport from the government.)

A dark new year’s day, bringing a dark new year? Probably not. After

everything, there’s still bandwidth to look forward to. This will be a

make-or-break year for India Inc, the year when we consolidate our gains and the

position of India in the services space, leveraging the small beginnings for the

brand, and backing it up with infrastructure. The biggest of these will be

bandwidth.

Everything from PC sales in small towns to e-biz infotech deployment in

enterprises is dependent on the available bandwidth in India. But the gains will

not be merely for infotech: they will be for the whole economy.

And businesses will be forced to undergo a basic shift, as they struggle to

compete with the world–and not just China–as borders and trade barriers open

up. If the network is the computer, the information is the enterprise, and

managing this information rapidly and efficiently is the big challenge for the

2001 enterprise. This will mean the elevation of infotech from support to key

strategic role in the many businesses where it does not already occupy this

position; the elevation of the CIO to very senior decision maker even in SMEs;

the overhaul of business processes and applications to bring them online; and

the critical dependence of the enterprise on bandwidth.

And the difference to the citizen? Access to information will be the big

change. It’s always a pleasant surprise to discover places this is already

happening. This month I found that our admin assistant tracked the progress of

my passport renewal application at www.passport.nic.in, discovered that it was

held up for an attestation on a photo, got it done, and then checked next day

online to make sure that it had moved on from there. He’s not much of a PC

user, but if going online saves him half a day of standing in queues, he’ll

happily go online.

So here’s to a 2001 where India will finally see the real power of the Big

B: Bandwidth, across its intercity backbone, on the Internet gateway, and in the

last mile. This will be the mantra for India 2001.