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Get Four
|  | SEPTEMBER 9, 2004
"India Has Ingenuity" That's why Tata Consultancy Services's Faqir Chand Kohli says the country's "cost of doing innovative technology is very, very low" Clearly visible through the windows of Faqir Chand Kohli's office in Nariman Point, Bombay's financial district, is the graceful sweep of the city's bay and beyond that, the bewildering number of high rises that are rapidly changing the colonial city's skyline. Kohli has occupied the corner office for 30 years as chairman of Tata Consultancy Services, Asia's largest software services outfit. Led by Kohli, the concern pioneered India's phenomenal rise as a power in software outsourcing. Kohli is in that office even now, four years after he retired. That's because his job as India's pioneering software professional is not over. These days, the solemn, 80-year-old Kohli has a singular obsession: Using his technical expertise to help develop India. Kohli is worried about the Indians who don't have the benefit of education -- especially the country's roughly 250 million illiterate adults. Since retiring, he has helped developed an innovative computer-based functional literacy program for adults. Kohli spoke with BusinessWeek Correspondent Manjeet Kripalani about the literacy project, Tata, and innovation in India. Following are edited excerpts from their conversation: Q: How deep is the digital divide in India? A: I don't think there's really a divide. The question is: Are you using technology for everybody? China has six times the number of computers that India has and has written lots more software in Mandarin and Cantonese for their own people, whereas we have done it for others. China has used computers effectively in manufacturing, in agriculture. This year, China will install 13 million PCs, of which 8 or 9 million they will make themselves. We have just 3 million PCs. It's not that we're not doing well, but we're not doing enough. We have to have a domestic digital industry and speed up PC use. It's doable to make a sub-$200 PC, but it needs a huge initiative. We need more microelectronic engineers who understand the hardware. They will build embedded software, functionality in devices. You can't build up an industry with just 250 to 300 microelectronic engineers a year. We have requested the government to select 40 more colleges to provide a master's program in microelectronics. The Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, which is graduating 60 master's degrees in microelectronics, will provide the coursework, mentoring, and monitoring of the programs. Hopefully, in the next 12-18 months, we will break the back of the PC problem and have software in all Indian languages. Then the fun starts, when everyone will use it. I don't think it's the vested interests who are preventing this, it's just inertia. Q: Can India be a source of deep, real innovation? A: Big companies are geared up for incremental innovation. For us in India, the cost of doing innovative technology is very, very low. The capability of India is its people. We can assemble more good and intelligent people than anywhere in the world. I admire China, but our people are better. India has ingenuity. If an ordinary car mechanic is aided by computers and simulation, his productivity leaps. Q: Tell me about your computer-aided adult-literacy program. What made you pursue it? A: [For years,] the Indian government has been spending a lot of money and resources on adult literacy. It has been using conventional methods. While there has been some progress, it's inadequate, considering that about 250 million adults in India are still illiterate. There are constraints: You need 200 hours of instruction for full literacy, and you need trained teachers to teach. If I'm 25 and working in a field or as a housewife, how will I find those 200 hours? As for teachers, we need 500,000 trained teachers to come to 500,000 villages. Where will they come from? So I started thinking: How can we learn, recognize images, retain, recall. I found that we usually look at images and icons -- pictures, faces, and words are all icons -- and relate it to a sound pattern. Then it sticks. Maybe someone in the world has tried this out, but not in this manner. The key was, when done with the program, the person should be able to read a newspaper in their own language. It needed a vocabulary of 400-600 words. So, starting in early 2000, three or four of us -- three TCS engineers and a linguist -- prepared a vocabulary of 500 words. And we prepared the lessons in a month or so. Then we experimented, and the first lesson was in a village called Medak, outside Hyderabad. We upgraded the keyboard in Telegu [the local language]. And we got 20 volunteers for lessons, thrice a week for 1.5 hours each. After 8-to-10 weeks, people started reading the newspaper. Our major experiment was in Guntur, again in the same state. We had the same results. We have experimented in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali with the same results. Our experiment was complete. We've told the government to take over. We've shown what we can do with a sampling of 50,000 people in five languages. We have a social message: We want people to not just read the newspaper, but read their land records, the political manifestos -- not just hear speeches during election time. People are reading their children's books now.
BW MALL
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