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Whose golden egg?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The

Boeing 767 had been taxing for almost 15 minutes now. It was almost

like driving a car through a city colony. Accelerate, stop, turn,

cruise, look around and so on. The only difference was that this

was not a car and we were not in India. It was the Chicago O’ Hare

airport in the US. And as I pressed my face intently against the

pane, I visualized the size of this mammoth airport...hmm, the airport

could easily span all the way from Nehru Place to IIT Gate to Defence

Colony. A triangle of three localities covering half the area of

south Delhi.

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While travelling in the US, if keep

your eyes and ears open and let loose a roving mind, one of the

many learning experiences is the appreciation of scale. The Americans

seem to follow a rule of minimum density with increasing scale in

every aspect of their life, including airports, cities, roads, hotels,

offices, open spaces, dwellings and so on without exception.

The media in this country, sometimes

does a good job of propagating half myths. Every second day a feature

informs us that multiplying vehicles will be the cause of unimaginable

traffic management and pollution catastrophes. But on the highways

of small time US-city Orlando, I saw as many cars as in Delhi and

Mumbai put together, travelling effortlessly and without a whimper

of smoke from their nostrils. Is the number of vehicles plying therefore

a bone of contention? Hardly! What is a crippling blow is the lack

of planning for growth, encouragement to investors for infrastructure

development and deployment of suitable technologies on a sufficiently

large scale.

In a remote way there is a parallel

between India and the US. Both have huge geographical expanses and

both have top class populations to fill them, with the US importing

and attracting the best of breed from elsewhere. Both countries

also have huge capital bases. But that’s where the parallel ends.

The US has developed those geographical expanses through private

funding, deployed technology on an enormous scale and imported the

best of breed to work in that country. In this country, we still

deliberate on how to get started.

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The Finance Minister is confronted

time and again by allies in the democratic alliance as well as the

opposition, that he dare not sell stakes in the golden navaratnas

at anything but an estoric ultimate. Politicians and protected lobbies

cry themselves hoarse that the public sector is a hotbed of golden

eggs and any such move will mean loss of booty. Consider as an example,

the biggest infotech challenge of the millenium–the convergence

of internet, wireless and telephony. Remote connectivity of appliances,

applications off the web and mutation of the PC will continue to

dominate vendor strategies and technologies in the near future.

Transition to this new paradigm requires an excellent telecom environment

in the country. And if there is any single institution, which will

fight tooth and nail against this transition it will be the DoT.

Since the DoT erroneously believes it is the golden goose with the

golden eggs. The DoT also has the singular distinction of putting

the country back by five years in the internet space with similar

orchestrations elsewhere.

After the examples of Infosys and Satyam

Infoway on the Nasdaq, the golden goose of the country today is

very clearly our ability to go global. While the country maybe a

hotbed of golden eggs many of them have yet to be laid. As we enter

the next decade and century, the dynamics of this country will continue

to be dominated by those who believe they own the golden eggs and

those who don’t care. Only time will tell who will lay the golden

egg. Meet you in the next millennium.

Arun

Shankar

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