The Big B and the CMs

While the 10 chief ministers of Indian states, getting

together under one roof for a luncheon meeting, certainly had Bill Gates on

their minds, they also had other issues on their agenda. Meeting up with the

head honcho of the #1 global software company was not just about getting his

insights, but about sharing their plans, experiences and directions in IT and

e-governance in their own states.

In fact, the meeting wasn’t so much a Bill Gates rendezvous

with Indian chief ministers. It was more of a meeting with CEOs–heads of

states that were more in the business leader mould than typical, quintessential

netas. The Andhra CM’s magic has worked off on many others.

For most of us, brought up on a healthy diet of khaki clad,

cliché spouting politicos, the new-look CMs are almost a culture shock. A breed

different from the traditional politicians we have known, the gathering that met

up with Gates was an IT-savvy, IT-enabled and IT-friendly group of statesmen,

set to move their respective states into the digital era. In fact, so impressed

was Gates by India’s political elite, he stated that even 10 governors from US

states could not have come up with the kind of interesting suggestions that the

Indian think tank had managed.

Gone were the roti kapada aur makaan slogans. In their stead

we witnessed the bandying about of high tech and buzzwords: bandwidth, fiber

optic networks, distance learning, e-governance, and what have you. Our new

slogan is undoubtedly roti, kapada, makaan, bijli aur bandwidth.

The CMs were clearly hell bent on "making an

impression" on Gates. Having shaken off their old mantles, they were set to

prove that they were geared up for the "Internext" generation, and

that they have already created major IT roadmaps for their states. Whether it

was Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh, Keshubhai Patel of Gujarat, Haryana’s Om

Prakash Chauthala, or Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh, the emphasis was

clearly on inviting IT investments within their geographies and creating IT

blueprints for their domains. The Haryana chieftain for instance extolled the

virtues of Gurgaon, an emerging hub of IT and software development, which is now

competing with other "silicon regions" in India such as Bangalore,

Hyderabad, Madras, Mumbai’s SEEPZ, and NEPZ in Noida, UP.

Keshubhai Patel’s thrust was on convincing Gates to bring

Microsoft to Gujarat. He was emphatic about the fact that IT and infrastructure

were the new vistas opening up where giants such as Reliance were showing

interest. Gates in fact committed to the opening up of an office in Gujarat.

Most Indian states today boast an IT policy and most have

major plans for using IT as a tool to improve the lives and times of the people

in their states. The CMs alias CEOs were clear that IT needed to be used as a

crucial tool to take education to the masses and create more jobs and employment

for their electorate. Using technology as an enabler, they are talking in terms

of easing the lives of the man on the street with conveniences such as

e-taxation, e-license delivery, e-education and e-governance.

While Andhra Pradesh’s laptop-wielding chief, Chandrababu

Naidu (four meetings old with Gates) bagged a $50 million investment from

Microsoft in its Hyderabad center, S M Krishna exacted a promise from Gates that

Bangalore would be the latter’s destination of choice on his next visit to

India.

What was interesting to see was that besides the early IT

pioneers such as Karnataka (which houses India’s "silicon plateau"

Bangalore) and Andhra Pradesh, a number of other states are also staking their

claims to the broadening IT pie. Earlier it was only a handful of names that

featured on India’s IT map. Today, the story is quite different. UP chief

minister Ram Prakash Gupta’s inputs led Gates to talk about bringing out

Microsoft products in Indian vernacular languages. From Vilasra Deshmukh and

Chagan Bujbal, Gates evidently got the inspiration to seriously consider doing

some work in the realm of e-commerce and e-governance architecture in

Maharashtra. Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh’s suggestion that Microsoft

adopt a school in the remote interiors of the state was considerably favorably.

Pushing the case for Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot convinced

Microsoft’s chairman that remote education would prove to be an oasis in the

vast, dry landscape of the state.

Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit’s innovative idea of an IT college

for training teachers also went down well with Bill Gates, as also did the

Punjab CM Badal’s suggestion that India’s rich state needed to move from an

agrarian economy to an IT-led life on the superhighway.

Gates’ interaction with India’s "state CEOs"

then was almost a meeting of contemporaries with business on their minds. It’s

a new bunch of CMs we have today; a far cry from the old time stereotypes.

The net effect of his luncheon interaction with the ministers

was that Bill Gates received at least ten different perceptions about the Indian

market, which in turn led him to think in new directions.

The net gain for India was that Bill Gates is now a new

ambassador for the Indian IT industry. Since his visit to India, he has already

made two powerful statements. One, that India is a software superpower. Two, if

the US has first-mover advantage in software products, then India has the

first-mover advantage in software services. Billion-dollar statements from the

world’s richest man.

Dewang Mehta



is president of Nasscom, the National Association of Software and Services
Companies of India