India's Computer Revolution

▪ 2001

      In May 2000 India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha (House of the People), passed the Information Technology Bill to boost e-commerce and Internet-related business in the country. The bill provided a legal framework for e-commerce, legalized digital documents, and created a police task force to deal with the unsavoury fallout of India's computer revolution—cyber crime. The bill was another milestone in India's journey toward becoming a key player in the knowledge economy, a journey that started with the 5th-century Indian mathematician Aryabhata I's introduction of the concept of zero, the basis of all programming.

      At the nucleus of the computer revolution were the major metropolitan cities, notably Mumbai (Bombay) and Chennai (Madras), and the silicon triangle of Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad. With the help of these cities, India exported an estimated $4 billion worth of software to the West. Wipro Ltd., a conglomerate based in Bangalore, was identified as India's third largest information technology (IT) company, and Wipro's chairman, Azim H. Premji (see Biographies (Premji, Azim )), was listed as one of the world's richest men.

      Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which benefited only India's urban elite, the knowledge revolution by 2000 had permeated all sections of Indian society. In a clutch of villages in Madhya Pradesh, an intranet connected rural cyber cafés, allowing villagers access to computerized land records. Project Gyandoot (“Messenger of Knowledge”) helped farmers get the best prices for their produce from nearby markets such as Indore and Mumbai. Another wired village, Nayla, Rajasthan, used the Internet in social development schemes, an innovation that impressed U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton during his March 2000 visit to India.

      What powered the computer revolution was India's intellectual capital—an over four million-strong technically trained workforce fluent in English—and a 10–12-hour time difference that ensured round-the-clock productivity for North American and European countries outsourcing their software requirements. The low cost of labour and high quality of software capabilities in India spawned such IT-enabled services as call centres, medical transcription, animation, back-office operations, and revenue accounting.

      According to India's Ministry of Information Technology, the software industry was projected to export $6 billion worth of software by 2001, and it hoped to reach a stunning $10 billion by 2002. Indian software was expected to be a $5.7 billion industry in 1999–2000. In December 1999 a report commissioned by the National Association of Software and Service Companies predicted that by the year 2008 software and services would contribute more than 7.5% of India's overall gross domestic product growth, with IT exports accounting for 35% of the country's total exports.

      The watershed year of this revolution was 1998, when such Indian companies as Infosys and Satyam Infoway emerged as world players as fears over computer problems on Jan. 1, 2000, and preparations for the European Union's new currency unit, the euro, increased demand for Indian software programmers. The Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy (Hi-Tec City) in Hyderabad powered the growth of this computer mecca, nicknamed Cyberabad. American companies such as Texas Instruments, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Motorola, and GE Capital established operations in India, including software-development centres.

Shalaka Paradkar

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