India Unbound
Bypassed by the industrial age, India has the opportunity and the ambition to be a major player in the information age. But first, the country has to tackle some vexing infrastructure and political challenges.
Fri, December 01, 2000
CIO
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CIO Senior Editors Tom Field and Cheryl Bentsen traveled to five Indian IT hot spots in August and September. Amid poverty, sickness and the occasional riot, they met with leaders in IT, government and business who have high hopes for India's future as an information age powerhouse.
It's only been nine years. This is what I remind myself as I stand atop Cyber Towers in HITEC City, one of India's ultramodern IT office parks. Eleven stories high and fighting to stand in a monsoon wind, I survey greater Hyderabad and see just how much the IT industry has changed India. To my right is the brand-new Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), a public/private venture tailor-made to train a new generation of knowledge workers. To my left is the still-under-construction Cyber Gateway, an 886,000 square foot office complex that will soon open its doors to a host of high-tech tenants eager to take advantage of India's low-cost labor and HITEC City's high-value telecommunications infrastructure and modern amenities. Below me, in the Cyber Towers itself, is a vibrant glass-and-steel complex already aglow from the energy of such big-name tenants as General Electric, Microsoft and Oracle.
Ten years ago, none of these things existed. There was no HITEC City, no IIIT and no Cyber Towers. It was only nine years ago that ex-Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's government initiated a series of reforms designed to open India's insular, insecure economy. By making it easier for the world to do business, India finally got its chance to stand and deliver in the global marketplace. The result is what one sees from the rooftop of Cyber Towers: a country absolutely transformed by the business of IT. Ten years ago, IT was a $150 million industry in India's largely agrarian economy—a piddling amount considering the country's population of 1 billion. Today, IT is a $5.7 billion industry in India, and it is projected to be an $8 billion industry by 2002—maybe $80 billion by 2010.
And yet, as I leave HITEC City, I ride over craggy roadways crammed with cars, motorbikes and cows. The belching auto emissions are so noxious, the honking horns so incessant, the roadside trash so imposing that my driver turns to me and says in broken English, "We have every kinds of pollutions here." We pass the sprawling shanty villages that house the hungry, stop in traffic and become fair game to the ragged beggars seeking rupees for food, and I think, "You have every kinds of poverty too." But again I remind myself: It's only been nine years. Even at Internet speed, age-old problems can't go away overnight.
