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TIMES OF INDIA
Indiatimes > The Times of India > All That Matters > Article
Looking to the future with Brand IIT
Shashi Tharoor | December 31, 2006
The New Year is always a time to look forward, and few subjects warrant as optimistic a look to the future as Indian science and technology.
Living as I am these days in the US, I have had the particular pleasure of seeing some of the prospects first hand, having been asked to address a global gathering of IIT alumni in Mumbai just before Christmas.
Demographic projections suggest that the next US Census will find more Indian-Americans than American Indians. When I was admitted to an American graduate school in 1975, not too many history honours students were making the journey to America.
Already, though, our counterparts at India's elite technological universities and engineering colleges — especially those from the Indian Institutes of Technology or IITs — had begun to snap up the fellowships that American munificence provided.
They went on to form the creative backbone of the global information revolution with their quick minds and developed crucial innovations that changed the way Americans live.
IITians dominate what Americans call the "honour roll". Arun Netravali, former president of Bell Laboratories, received the Presidential Medal of Technology for pioneering the technology which enabled high definition television, HDTV and Internet streaming-videos.
Raj and Neera Singh, an entrepreneurial couple, pioneered the use of cell-phone and pager technology in 40 countries.
Mohamed Zaidi, as president of Alcoa in Germany, pioneered the first aluminum-based automobiles for various models of Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volvo and Porsche.
Dr Mani Bhaumik invented the cold laser technique which is used for laser eye surgery machines and has benefited over 15 million patients worldwide.
Padma Warrior as CTO of Motorola is creating more affordable mobile phones for the Indian rural markets. (These stars and many more — 101 global IITians in all — will be featured in a book by IIT alumnus Ranjan Pant, to be published early 2007)The success of these IITians and several thousand more transformed the image of their homeland and its people.
To the American mind, the stereotypical Indian is no longer a snake charmer but a software guru. For an aspiring Indian, nothing succeeds like the success of your compatriots.
Today, an Indian student with decent grades has a better-than-ever chance of admission to an American university of his or her choice, with a substantial scholarship.
This blossoming of the Indian diaspora has happened because of seeds sown decades ago by the founders of great institutions like the IITs.
When I wrote a short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: the Invention of India, 2003), I became conscious of the extent to which we have taken for granted one vital legacy of his: the creation of an infrastructure for excellence in science and technology, which has become a source of great self-confidence and competitive advantage for India today.
Nehru was always fascinated by science and scientists. He made it a point to attend the annual Indian Science Congress every year, and he gave free rein (and taxpayers' money) to scientists in whom he had confidence to build high-quality institutions.
Men like Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai constructed the platform for Indian accomplishments in the fields of atomic energy and space research; they and their successors have given India a scientific establishment without peer in the developing world.
Nehru's establishment of the IITs (and the spur they provided to other institutions like Birla Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management) have produced many of the finest minds in America's Silicon Valley and Fortune-1000 Corporations.
Today, an IIT degree is held in the same reverence in the US as one from MIT or Caltech. The next step is for IITians in India and IITians abroad to strengthen their bonds at events such as this month's conference in Mumbai to help combine their intellectual talents, resources and skills to help each other expand into each other's markets.
One can imagine IIT alumni abroad enhancing opportunities for their businesses by partnering with Indian companies led by IITians here, and vice-versa.
Such "IIT alumni to IIT alumni trade" could apply to many industries and even to higher education, where IIT alumni professors from Indian institutions and those attending from abroad can plan to exchange students and faculty and collaborate across borders on research.
IITians should take advantage of events like this one in Mumbai and other IIT events which are now being held globally with increasing frequency (such as the meetings planned for California in the summer and in Tokyo next fall) to pursue such collaboration.
India's extraordinary emergence in new-age industries — software, Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing — is the indirect result of Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in scientific education.
Nehru left India with the world's second-largest pool of trained scientists and engineers, integrated into the global intellectual system, to a degree without parallel outside the developed West.
His legacy is not one we can afford to be complacent about. After all, the roots of Indian science and technology go far deeper than Nehru.
The Rig Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together 24 centuries before the apple fell on Newton's head.
The Vedic civilisation subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth at a time when everyone else, even the Greeks, assumed the earth was flat.
And yet, we lost the global lead in science and technology for over a millennium. This New Year's, it is time to resolve that we will never allow ourselves to slip behind again.
That will require resources — serious money for research, world-class lab facilities. But above all it will require one commodity India is not short of — brains (and the determination to use them).
"Brand IIT" has shown the way. In 2007, we must start to scale this up to the point where one day "Brand India" becomes synonymous not with cheap products or services but with the highest standards of scientific and technological excellence.
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