NYTimes on Great Indian Dream

[Guest guest]

The Great Indian Dream

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/opinion/11FRIE.html?hp

By Thomas Friedman, BANGALORE, India. Published: March 11, 2004

 

Nine years ago, as Japan was beating America's brains out in the

auto

industry, I wrote a column about playing a computer geography game

with

my daughter, then 9 years old. I was trying to help her with a clue

that clearly pointed to Detroit, so I asked her, "Where are cars

made?"

And she answered, "Japan." Ouch.

 

Well, I was reminded of that story while visiting an Indian software

design firm in Bangalore, Global Edge. The company's marketing

manager,

Rajesh Rao, told me he had just made a cold call to the vice

president

for engineering of a U.S. company, trying to drum up business. As

soon

as Mr. Rao introduced himself as calling from an Indian software

firm,

the U.S. executive said to him, "Namaste" — a common Hindi greeting.

Said Mr. Rao: "A few years ago nobody in America wanted to talk to

us. Now

they are eager." And a few even know how to say hi in proper Hindu

fashion. So now I wonder: if I have a granddaughter one day, and I

tell her

I'm going to India, will she say, "Grandpa, is that where software

comes from?"

 

Driving around Bangalore you might think so. The Pizza Hut billboard

shows a steaming pizza under the headline "Gigabites of Taste!" Some

traffic signs are sponsored by Texas Instruments. And when you tee

off on

the first hole at Bangalore's KGA golf course, your playing partner

points at two new glass-and-steel buildings in the distance and

says: "Aim

at either Microsoft or I.B.M."

 

How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive

poverty

to the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs?

Answer:

good timing, hard work, talent and luck.

 

The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off

decades of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a

focus on

foreign trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to

succeed

at innovation to stay at home, not go to the West. This, in turn,

enabled India to harvest a lot of its natural assets for the age of

globalization.

 

One such asset was Indian culture's strong emphasis on education and

the widely held belief here that the greatest thing any son or

daughter

could do was to become a doctor or an engineer, which created a huge

pool of potential software technicians. Second, by accident of

history and

the British occupation of India, most of those engineers were

educated

in English and could easily communicate with Silicon Valley. India

was

also neatly on the other side of the world from America, so U.S.

designers could work during the day and e-mail their output to their

Indian

subcontractors in the evening. The Indians would then work on it for

all

of their day and e-mail it back. Presto: the 24-hour workday.

 

Also, this was the age of globalization, and the countries that

succeed

best at globalization are those that are best at "glocalization" —

taking the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding

them

with their own culture, so they don't feel overwhelmed. India has

been

naturally glocalizing for thousands of years.

 

Then add some luck. The dot-com bubble led to a huge overinvestment

in

undersea fiber-optic cables, which made it dirt-cheap to transfer

data,

projects or phone calls to far-flung places like India, where Indian

techies could work on them for much lower wages than U.S. workers.

Finally, there was Y2K. So many companies feared that their

computers would

melt down because of the Year 2000 glitch they needed software

programmers to go through and recode them. Who had large numbers of

programmers

to do that cheaply? India. That was how a lot of Indian software

firms

got their first outsourced jobs.

 

So if you are worried about outsourcing, I've got good news and bad

news. The good news is that a unique techno-cultural-economic

perfect

storm came together in the early 1990's to make India a formidable

competitor and partner for certain U.S. jobs — and there are not a

lot of other

Indias out there. The bad news, from a competition point of view, is

that there are 555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of

them

want a piece of "The Great Indian Dream," which is a lot like the

American version.

 

As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this

tech thing was their private preserve is over. This is a wake-up

call for

U.S. workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If

they do that, he said, it will spur "a whole new cycle of

innovation, and

we'll both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both

lose."