A window of opportunity?

Microsoft's chief, Mr. Bill Gates, had come well-prepared... But to pin the hopes and aspirations of a nation on his visit will be absurd, says SANDEEP DIKSHIT.

FOR THE second time this year, the media went overboard over an American visiting India. A week ago, Mr. Bill Gates, unchallenged king of operating systems in PCs, squeezed in a one- day-one- night tour to Delhi between a World Economic Forum conference in Melbourne and the Olympics opening ceremony in Sydney. His visit could not quite eclipse the week-long stay by another equally famous American, Mr. Bill Clinton in March though.

Mr. Clinton, in keeping with his status as head of the world's most powerful nation, cut a wider swathe in economic as well as societal spheres than Mr. Gates. But the common factor was the statement the visits embodied. They pointed to India's resurgence as a strategic nation in a world no longer challenged by alternative ideologies. The idea of a worldwide free market is being sought to be tempered by humanism while the digital divide frequently becomes an issue for the world's information technology (IT) gurus to ponder over. Despite the need to make enhancements in both the currents, they are now seen as optimum tools for ensuring mankind's future prosperity. That the man who has made IT what it is today could squeeze in a day for India is gratifying in itself.

Apart from an hour-long visit to the Ministry of Information Technology to meet Mr. Pramod Mahajan, Mr. Gates was so short of time that even a dozen Chief Ministers were ushered to his hotel to present their wish-list to the Microsoft chief and hear him hold forth on the need for States to go all out on e-governance. But after Mr. Gates had finished rushing through the many halls in the capital's Maurya Sheraton, mediamen in particular were left with the hollow feeling that perhaps they had over- calculated the purpose of his visit. May be the excitement assiduously churned and nurtured by Mr. Gates' publicity managers diverted the scribes from the many issues dogging development of IT in the country.

The Microsoft chief, as always, had come well prepared. Not a sentence of his could be said to be out of sync with the demands of political propriety. But to pin the hopes and aspirations of a nation on this visit will be absurd. However, the arrival of the software king was no mean event. Having lost the trade war during the WTO negotiations, India's only ticket to prosperity is to export reams of software code prepared by its young people.

Indian policy-makers dream of making this the only country where this work can be done on behalf of software companies around the world. Some of that is already happening. Countries such as Japan and Germany, notorious for their immigration policies, are desperately seeking software programmers. Mr. Gates put the seal of approval on Indian capability when he personally exchanged a memorandum of understanding with Infosys for developing software for the ``.Net'' initiative, his latest and boldest gamble to dominate the cyber-world.

Thanks to the media's overindulgence last week with Microsoft and its chief software architect, the tangible benefits of Mr. Gates' visit are well-documented. Microsoft will invest Rs. 225 crores in beefing up its software development centres in the country and some individuals, societies and Governments are poised to gain a few crores of rupees from the Melinda-Bill Gates Foundation. The reputation of an Indian company, Infosys, as a software contractor is bound to be enhanced by its association with Microsoft. The lustre of being the chosen one is bound to rub off on other Indian companies who maintain similar quality standards and adhere to other international norms of fulfilling their contractual responsibilities.

But more important for the people at large are the intangible benefits that could flow from Mr. Gates' meeting with Chief Ministers - provided the latter do not view the interaction meeting as a one-off public relations exercise but carry on from where Mr. Gates stopped speaking. While interacting with the Chief Ministers, Mr. Gates brought the spotlight back on to need to promote software in local languages.

More important, the Microsoft chief held forth on the need for e- governance to improve the way people live, learn and work. And Microsoft is one company which is eminently qualified on this subject having extensively researched and conducted prototypes around the world on e-governance. Microsoft was behind Andhra Pradesh's celebrated ``Computer-aided administration of commercial taxes'' which detected a whopping Rs. 34 crores of evaded turnover and a more modest Rs. 2 crores in actual tax collected. It also helped develop Andhra Pradesh's hazard mitigation system to minimise damage caused by natural calamities because the departments concerned are able to anticipate shortage or excess rainfall in different regions within the State.

But one cannot overlook the glitches in the Indian system of governance due to which many good attempts come to naught. Despite the celebrated MoU signed during the first meeting between Mr. Gates and the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Mr. Chandrababu Naidu, the system could not prevent flood waters entering ``Cyberabad'' leading sceptics to wonder if ``Hyperabad'' was a more appropriate name.

Nor should one minimise the pot of gold for Microsoft and companies allied to it at the end of every such e-governance rainbow. Microsoft is not a bumbling sugar daddy out to improve the lot of the underdeveloped in the world through IT. It was charged with predatory business practices in its home country and even in India, the much derided, pliant and toothless tiger - the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) - managed to muster courage to at least conduct a preliminary enquiry on a complaint alleging that Microsoft had resorted to unfair trade practices.

One must invariably keep in sight a company's commercial objectives while marrying assistance offered by corporates with the nation's objectives. But there is much that India has to do on its own to ensure that the fruits of such alliances percolate to the grassroots. First and foremost is the need to develop local language software so that IT does not remain the sole preserve of the upper crust of the country due to its familiarity with English, the de facto language of governance across the country.

Among the reasons for low dissemination of local language software are lack of universally-accepted standards, slow pace of computerisation, absence of familiarity with the user interface and resistance to use. Another major hurdle is the use of English as a de facto standard and the aspiration to use English among neo-computer literates. According to a study, in their eagerness to retain a captive user base, software developers use proprietary encoding schemes to isolate their user base from competition and prevent users from exchanging software or fonts. The lack of support for multi-lingual software at the level of the operating system also encourages vendors to offer customised solutions. However, the support given to the universally- accepted Unicode by big players, primarily Microsoft, may bring about some uniformity in solutions developed in local languages.

Some States have managed to overcome resistance by Government staff to using local language software by ensuring incentive payment for users and appraisal of their computer skills in the annual performance report. ``The proverbial presence of a de facto business language, English, has been the proverbial last straw contributing to the slow pace of growth of multi-lingual computing,'' says a study, adding that English has become the common standard across States.

``(We have to) take IT to the masses. Unless the non-English speaking populace is exposed to the capabilities of IT and its benefits, it would always remain English-centric. Unless users at large feel proud of using the local language, the dominance of English will continue in all spheres of life. Several users do not know the ready availability of local language software. It is felt that English is the only language,'' noted a MAIT report.

Promotion of local language must come from State Governments as they account for 60 per cent of local language software use and this dominance will continue. Other States should emulate the example of Tamil Nadu which has ensured data entry in Tamil at semi-urban centres and is already laying optic fibre cables in villages in order to open internet kiosks to enable communication with State Departments. This market could grow to Rs. 120 crores to Rs. 125 crores over the next four to five years out of which Hindi and Tamil will account for Rs. 38 crores. Naturally, Microsoft, being an active propellant, will corner a chunk of the market.

Quality training for new IT graduates is another must. India must delve into its institutional capacity and reconfigure and revive its institutions to enable its software industry to move up the value chain in the international division of technology labour. Despite the current hype by the Dewang Mehtas, the fact remains that the Indian software industry depends largely on low-level, well-defined work and it needs to develop a base so that innovation is possible.

``While the vast liberalisation of the Indian economy allows for such changes, it is important not to underestimate the importance of the State in creating a milieu of innovation in India. There exist enormous constraints on the creation of such a milieu in India but with the appropriate rearrangement of institutions, such constraints can be overcome. In this process the role of the state, in concert with entrepreneurs and educators and is singular,'' cautions Dr. Romi Mahajan of the University of Texas who researches issues of political economy of the informational economy and is viewed as a voice which imparts some balance to the current lopsided debate on India's prowess in IT.

Mr. Gates is not the first to discover the advantages of using the low cost, skilled scientists and engineers. And the MAITs and the NASSCOMs are not the first to forecast mouth-watering export targets in the near future. Take for instance the much-discussed World Bank report in 1990 which had confidently predicted Rs. 4,500 crores in software exports in 1995-96. That report has gathered dust and new targets such as Mr. Pramod Mahajan's $50 billions in exports by 2008 are being bandied about. But it would be pertinent to note that despite the World Bank's predictions, software exports in 1995-96 were just 60 per cent of the target. Perhaps it is time, we started taking policy researchers more seriously than lobbyists and sundry industrialists.

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