Can India Bridge The 'Innovation Gap'?

India can innovate if Indians emerge from subsistence levels and the Modi government succeeds in facilitating the necessary environment.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will soon be visiting Silicon Valley, the first Indian prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to visit California, or indeed the west coast of America.

Going to a part of that country where India is, in reality, pretty remote to folks who are not ethnically South Asian, is fairly bold. California is mostly untroubled by — and distant from — the nuances of geopolitics that Washington DC specialises in, but is quintessentially American nevertheless. Though people seem laid back, productivity has not suffered. Silicon Valley has spawned some of the biggest multi-billion dollar corporations of the US, all the more remarkable for having emerged out of the proverbial ‘garage start-up’.

In Silicon Valley, ethnic Indians from India, as opposed to people who ceremonially wear feathered headdresses, have distinguished themselves. Indians have actually done so in many fields in the US — doctoring, politicking, business, academics, management, finance — but most noticeably in what people call that high-growth digital technology ‘incubator’.

This fact needs to be contrasted with the recent observation of Narayana Murthy, lead founder of the iconic  IT company Infosys, that regrettably, not a single game-changing innovation, invention, or discovery, has come from India in the 68 years since Independence.

To conclude that this is not due to the intellectual dullness of the Indian people is entirely reasonable, because Silicon Valley would probably not be what it is without its Indian contingent. So, it must be a matter of atmosphere, style of education, opportunity, and encouragement at one level, and financial incentive in the millions and billions of dollars at another.

Silicon Valley has made scores of millionaires and billionaires out of very young people on the strength of their ideas, ramping them up swiftly, often within a single year, to multiple applications, assisted by a highly appreciative and savvy venture capital scenario, magnified manifold by a dynamic stock market. This, besides the NYSE, even has a separate listing vehicle and index of its own, namely NASDAQ, also in New York.

While the US is renowned for its high academic standards in its Ivy League colleges, other academic/research institutions, and some of the leading state-run universities; Silicon Valley is populated by a large number of brilliant college dropouts. But these are obviously people, iconoclasts perhaps, but with the vision to create game-changers and breakthroughs.

That collectively they have succeeded in making a massive global impact is a tribute to the spirit of American ingenuity, embedded no doubt in the very air and water and the ‘can do’ culture of the country. It is this that has seen America surge ahead of the world in practically every field of endeavour.

Many of the Nobel laureates who are ethnic Indians owe it to the time they have spent living and working in America. India, on its part, quite often, has educated these very same achievers through school and college and even postgraduate levels in its IITs and IIMs. But their best abilities have not flowered at home but ‘over there’.

So what can we do about it to address Narayana Murthy’s implied question?

Probably not a lot, at least while we resident Indians are in transition, both with regard to our attitudes, our lack of original thinking, and our economic circumstances. In broad terms, we are both the ‘argumentative’ individualists, per Nobel laureate and welfare economist Amartya Sen, and slavishly conformist and hierarchical at the same time; based perhaps on our social organisation and history.

This is beginning to change amongst the youth most definitely, aspirational as they are and also unburdened by our socialist history.

That young people now constitute 65 per cent of the population in India will certainly provoke a gain in momentum as the time goes on.

But the fact is that at the same time there is little or no social security as it is understood in the West. There is no economic safety net, except perhaps at the subsistence level — that too most imperfectly.

This circumstance breeds conformity, even fear, certainly not innovation, except amongst the stoutest of hearts.

On top of this, despite multiple methods of calculating what constitutes dire straits, a majority of our people are under pressure to just make a day-to-day living. The oft-touted statistic of 50-60 per cent of our population that lives in the rural areas and contributes only a modest 16-17 per cent to the GDP is crying out for urgent reorganisation — because our countryside is spectacularly over-populated and under-productive.

Out of 1.27 billion people today, no more than 1 per cent are rich, comparable to the rich anywhere, and no more than 5 per cent inclusive, belong to the upper middle class, with standards of living as good as, if not better, than their counterparts in the West.

Yet at the same time, with some 15 to 20 million new births every year, usually at the bottom of the pyramid, the struggling 50% of the population that includes the lower middle class, can, and do, afford servants in this country. This certainly eases our day to day burdens of drudgery, even as it continues to promote the dictation of the traditionalist in our psyches. However, many of us would not be keen to trade in our daily privileges, inequitable as they might be,  for a more self-reliant setup.

Traditionalists, however, a nation full of them, cannot generally innovate. Our only hope to become here, at home, what we are in so distinguished a manner abroad, is to challenge our own systems and assumptions. We cannot do this without pain, both felt, and inflicted and so, the reluctance to sally forth, is understandable.

As a multi-lingual collective, in a country that is subcontinental in its pluralism and diversity, we probably cannot muster the requisite coherence, discipline and determination. This, despite several movements like the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj, both induced perhaps by the Anglican Church in British times. They and other reformist movements, from time to time, have achieved some limited success in changing attitudes, manners and mores, to be sure, but clearly not enough.

But there is hope. That which seemingly cannot come about as a social movement might well be brought about politically, by the power of the ballot and by a visionary government that radically changes the situation on the ground.

The Modi government has been promising much. It has plans to get rid of the babu’s files with digitisation. It wants to reform agriculture towards much greater productivity and supported by a distribution and materials handling backbone. Smart cities will be built, and millions are expected to be housed in them. A massive defence industry is in the process of being built from scratch. Other infrastructure in power, ports, roads, green energy, nuclear power, modern mining, and so on, are being created.

The intentions of this government, if brought to fruition, are indeed capable of changing the status quo beyond recognition. Of course, the vision must sustain the slings and arrows of vested interests that would destroy it, and the people must afford it the time to execute it.  This government will need much more than the five years of the current mandate. It will need to stretch into a decade or more, and others that come after it, have to carry the process forward.

But, if all this happens, will it be capable domestically of the game-changing innovation that Narayana Murthy spoke of?  Logically extrapolating on the unleashing of spirit, and possibilities it will bring about, as the American expression goes: ‘You bet!’