The Accidental Revolution

India’s $73 billion information technology industry emerged out of nowhere to the powerhouse it is today within four decades thanks to a series of unrelated happenings in the country and abroad.

When Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric bulb in the latter part of 19th century, he did not foresee the emergence public and home lighting and a huge global power generation and transmission industry. Similarly, laying the foundation stone for today’s aviation industry would hardly have been the main thought in the minds of Wright brother when they designed the human civilization’s first flying machine.

The Long Revolution The Harper Collins book is an extremely valuable resource for future researchers of technology in India.

The history of humans in the last few centuries is full of such examples of ingenuity of the inhabitants of our planet turning many small steps into collective giant leaps for all in thousands of unimaginable ways.

India’s information technology (IT) industry also owes its creation to one such act that happened at the opposite end of the globe. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had decided to discontinue teaching of electrical engineering courses in power transmission and electrical machines in the early 1960s. Naren Patni, son of a textile mill owner in Rajasthan, was not aware of this change in MIT when he landed there to pursue higher studies in electrical engineering after getting a no-strings attached scholarship from the Grass Foundation, Massachusetts.

So Patni had to opt to study the newly introduced courses in control systems which were designed to train engineers to handle analog control systems of a variety of modern equipment such as gun turret controls and radar tracking systems. The western world, after the Second World War was moving towards greater use of analog computing methods in industrial production process and control systems.

Patni later met many other pioneers who were working on different aspects of computing. He also happened to work with the team that was converting large amounts of court documents and other public data into magnetic tapes using the rudimentary punching paper tapes. Patni saw the opportunity to get this work done cheaply in India. He founded Patni Computer Services (PCS) as one of the first Indian companies specializing in handling outsourcing services. The famed founders of Infosys were among the first set of employees of PCS and the innocuous decision of MIT to discontinue teaching electrical engineering had played a major role in seeding the growth of India’s IT industry.

The MIT and Patni story is just one of hundreds of happenings in various parts of India and the rest of the world that has had a major impact on the formation of India’s now much-acclaimed IT sector. Veteran science journalist, Dinesh C Sharma, based in New Delhi for nearly three decades, has attempted to document as many of these seemingly disparate happenings which have in some ways contributed to the emergence of the Indian IT industry. Sharma’s monumental effort has appeared as a Harper Collins book, THE LONG REVOLUTION, the birth and growth of India’s IT industry. Sharma’s decades of journalistic writing skills have been admirably combined with the rigors of academic research. The 427-page IT story has been embellished with 36 pages of extensive references, making it an extremely valuable resource for future researchers of India’s IT segment.

This book is not an effort to take a critical look at either the government policies or the lack of it which slowed the emergence of the IT industry. Nor is it an attempt by Sharma to join the debate on the technological capabilities vis-à-vis business acumen of Indian IT sector’s leading players. No wonder neither the government nor the industry has had any role in assisting the writing of this book. The book has been facilitated by the resources provided to the author by the New India Foundation which gave him a fellowship to take up this task in between jobs in the mainstream media.

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Sharma’s extensive interactions with the key policy makers, technocrats and the pioneering IT industry leaders in the last two decades during his journalistic career have come in to capturing interesting nuggets of information from a wide range of sources and players. Sharma has made full use of these contacts to present to the reader in a highly readable format the numerous “accidental” decisions that played an unintended catalytic role in the emergence of India’s IT industry.

For example, if the American company, Data Basic Corporation (DBC), was in a position to locate one of its newest computer, Eclipse MV/8000, at its newly-opened office in Bombay, India’s software outsourcing industry would have taken some more years to be born. Import restrictions in the 1970s would have taken DBC at least three years to get a government permission to bring the computer to Bombay. The software start up Infosys which was contracted to write the software for DBC computers instead suggested its engineers move to the US to complete the task and save time. Thus the “body shopping” concept in software industry was born.