COVER STORY:
The Knowledge Advantage: What India Needs to Do – A Siliconeer report
All the hoopla over the hundreds and thousands of jobs created by back office work leaves Sam Pitroda unimpressed. This is just a drop in the bucket, he says. To really get ahead, India needs a total knowledge makeover, because knowledge is not just about education, it is about a whole lot of things. A Siliconeer exclusive interview with Sam Pitroda.
You have recently told the BBC Hindi service that India’s success with BPO has been overhyped. Why?
I think BPO has gotten a lot of publicity in India, outside India. Rightfully so, in one way, because it has created jobs in urban areas, in modernized sectors. But at the same time we have lost sight of the fact that it has created only a handful of jobs in a nation of a billion people. We need to create 10 million jobs every year and BPO has created 500,000 jobs, which is really a drop in the ocean. But it affects well-to-do families, urban families . . .
 |
| Sam Pitroda is the chairman of India’s National Knowledge Commission. |
In fact that was something I was going to raise with you. Do you think that one of the reasons BPO has gotten this much attention is that the Indian audiovisual media, and perhaps to some degree the print media, has a habit of focusing obsessively on the metropolitan areas and tends to extrapolate from that and draw conclusions about entire India?
Absolutely. Because they see if they go to a club, they go to a friend’s house, they go to a wedding, and they all talk about “Oh, my son’s working in BPO,” “My brother-in-law’s cousin is working in a BPO.” (That’s) the ecosystem in which they live in, and pretty soon they lose sight of the fact that this is not really India.
Let’s talk about the Knowledge Commission that you happen to chair. Has the commission as a whole done any work on this?
The commission has not done work on BPO because it’s such a small piece of the puzzle. The commission is really first focused on e-governance.
Okay, let me rephrase that question. Give our readers a sense about the organization. It’s a bit odd. You are there, DSE sociologist Andre Beteille, a lot of distinguished, interesting people are there, but we do not know a whole lot about it.
So give a thumbnail sketch for our readers on why you people were brought together by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and what your general agenda is, what you are trying to do.
The idea was that what we tried to do 30 years ago to telecom, in mid-’80s, had far-reaching implications for India in the 20 years down the road. At that time when I talked about telecom revolution down the road in India, people used to laugh at us saying, “Look, India needs water, agriculture and why telecom, why IT, why software? Why computers?” My answer then was, “Look, I know how to deal with telecom, I don’t know how to deal with water, so let me do my telecom job. Because I believe telecom is an important part of transformation of India because it results in connectivity, networking, democratization, resource utilization.” IT telecom did transform India.
Twenty years down the road, Congress government came to power. A national advisory council headed by Sonia Gandhi — I was a member — was asked to look at science and technology and education. I spent some time, and based on that I felt that if you focus on knowledge today, 20 years down the road, you will see some significant change in India.
And knowledge is not about education, it is about a whole lot of things.
So I put together a presentation for the National Advisory Council, gave them a presentation, and then I talked to PM and PM liked the idea. And I am sure PM must have talked to other people as well. But immediately PM said, “Sam, we want to do this.” So I said, let’s wait for six months, do a little bit of thinking and I want to internalize the issue. So I spent six months reading, understanding, talking to people at Harvard, MIT, Japan, you know, looking at what everybody is doing.
The Knowledge Commission: Objectives
The overall task before the National Knowledge Commission is to take steps that will give India the ‘knowledge edge’ in the coming decades, i.e. to ensure that the country becomes a leader in the creation, application and dissemination of knowledge.
Creation of new knowledge principally depends on strengthening the education system, promoting domestic research and innovation in laboratories as well as at the grassroots level, and tapping foreign sources of knowledge through more open trading regimes, foreign investment and technology licensing.
Application of knowledge will primarily target the sectors of health, agriculture, government and industry. This involves diverse priorities like using traditional knowledge in agriculture, encouraging innovation in industry and agriculture, and building a strong e-governance framework for public services.
Dissemination of knowledge focuses on ensuring universal elementary education, especially for girls and other traditionally disadvantaged groups; creating a culture of lifelong learning, especially for skilled workers; taking steps to boost literacy levels; and using Information and Communication Technology to enhance standards in education and widely disseminate easily accessible knowledge that is useful to the public.
(Source: Knowledge Commission Web site)
|
You say that knowledge is not the same as education. Would you elaborate on that?
You see, when you look at education, it is one piece of the puzzle. To me there are five aspects of knowledge. One is access to knowledge. Who has access to knowledge? How do you get access to knowledge? In access, we are looking at things like reservations, affirmative action programs, libraries, networks, portals to really improve access to knowledge for large number of people where they are all over in multiple languages.
Then second piece is: Knowledge concepts, which is basically education. Primary education, secondary education, university, distance learning, vocational training, all of that. Third piece is creation of knowledge. Where is knowledge created? In science and technology laboratories, in research activities. So that piece also includes intellectual property, copyright, trademark, innovation, entrepreneurship. Fourth piece is application of knowledge. How is knowledge applied? Where do you apply knowledge? Application in agriculture, application in industry and application in health. And fifth piece is knowledge-related services. How knowledge can transform governance. We have really not looked at transforming governance in the last 60 years. We have made incremental changes here and there. If you focus on e-governance, you can really begin to look at transformation of government in a very different way.
Take for example, how do you get a birth certificate? Or land records? An issue of perennial fights and arguments.
Absolutely. You know, all these processes are set up 70-80 years ago in British period, and today we are computerizing those processes. So Knowledge Commission has looked and said: “We need to really first redo the processes.” In other words, we really need to restructure the processes before we computerize. Today, we have to redo the process of getting land record, process of getting birth certificate, process of applying for admission to a school instead of doing it the same way we have been doing for the past 80 years.
So going back to the earlier question: There are really five areas of knowledge. Access, concept, creation, application and services.
So we are looking at knowledge horizontally, also vertically. We are also looking at traditional knowledge. We have set up this group of eight prominent people, they have different backgrounds, different sort of experiences. In first couple of meeting (we were) getting to know each other, we all have to click, and see the problem the same way. Then we decided to focus on something like 100 different activities, of which, we said: “Look, we can do only limited things.” So let’s focus on 20 for the first year. Now we are focused on 20 activities. We have set up some working groups, we had some meetings. First was really e-governance. We have submitted our recommendations to the prime minister on e-governance, very different from the way we are doing it today.
The Knowledge Commission: Members
Sam Pitroda, chairman of the Knowledge Commission, has spent four decades in the world of telecommunications helping bridge the global communications divide. His professional career has been divided between the three continents of North America, Asia and Europe.
Widely regarded as the architect of modern biology and biotechnology in India, Dr. P.M. Bhargava, vice chairman of the Knowledge Commission, is currently chairman of The Medically Aware and Responsible Citizens of Hyderabad, the Sambhavna Trust, Bhopal, and the Basic Research, Education and Development Society, New Delhi.
Dr. André Béteille is professor emeritus of sociology in the University of Delhi. He is known world-wide for his contribution to the comparative study of social inequality. He has lectured in many universities and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Dr Ashok Ganguly is currently the chairman of ICICI OneSource Limited and ABP Pvt Ltd., and has been a director on the central board of the Reserve Bank of India, since November 2000. In addition, he heads his own consulting company, Technology Network India Pvt Ltd.
Dr. Jayati Ghosh is professor of economics and currently also chairperson at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research interests include globalization, international trade and finance, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and issues related to gender and development.
Deepak Nayyar is professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Earlier he has taught economics at the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex and the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata. Until recently, he was vice chancellor of the University of Delhi.
One of the founders of Infosys Technologies Ltd., Nandan M. Nilekani is currently its Chief Executive Officer. In the past he has also been its Managing Director, President and Chief Operating Officer. Nilekani co-founded India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies.
Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president and chief executive, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He was previously professor of government at Harvard University and associate professor of government and of social studies at Harvard.
(Source: Knowledge Commission Web site)
|
Obviously you can’t detail the entire set of recommendations. But can you tell us one or two salient things that you recommended?
One suggestion is that we really need to focus on reengineering of processes before we computerize.
What do you mean by that?
What we mean by that is the current practice is to take the existing process and computerize. How do you file income tax? They are taking how you file income tax and then computerizing it, rather than saying that the process of filing income tax is wrong. If you had to redo in 2006, how would you redo it? So process reengineering is a prerequisite to computerization.
Then standardization. Today every state is doing their own thing. Karnataka is doing something, Andhra Pradesh is doing something else. We are saying, “Look, that is not acceptable. We must have some standards.” Why should birth certificates be different in every state? It could be different in language, but it should look alike. It should be Indian birth certificate.
We are doing our police records (differently). One state cannot read another state’s police record. One district cannot read another district’s police record.
So we are really attacking a problem in a very different way. Like standardization.
Then, Web-based services. Every state today is doing their work in letter-driven approach. We are saying you can’t do that, we should have a federal Web-based service.
Today, everybody is doing their own thing, and lot of this stuff is not viable because there is no business model.
We have done I think a reasonably good job — (Infosys CEO) Nandan Nilekani has spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time, and we have basically accepted recommendations.
Reservations are a political minefield. How do you propose to navigate in this dangerous territory?
Let’s do one thing at a time. We know that we can’t do everything.
So first we have taken e-governance. Now we are taking university reforms, because our universities are in a mess. A country of a billion people cannot have 300 universities, you want 2,000 universities. We can’t have affiliated colleges, we can’t have same level of standardization university. We need different levels of universities — good universities, very good universities and okay universities. We need different pay scales. We have done a lot of work on university reforms. We will be submitting that in next few weeks.
Then we have started working groups on translation. We believe translation is a multi-billion dollar business in India, which we have not really focused on. You know, I don’t know good literature in Tamil or Gujarati, good literature in Bengali or Malayalam. We haven’t done that. We only translate English stuff.
Then we have working groups on traditional knowledge, on distance learning, on vocational training, on innovations. So we have lots of groups set up, we have meetings going on, we have talked to industry, we have started consultation process, we’ve met with the members of Parliament, all that process has started.
You are based in Illinois. Mr. Nilekani, presumably, is based in Bangalore. How do you work?
We are working through networking and all, because all these people have full-time jobs, and we wanted to make sure that people who have full-time jobs get involved in it and do not take this as a full time job, because I don’t want this to be a bureaucratic office. Nobody takes salary, everybody pays their own staff. There are ten bright guys who are helping us to coordinate our work. They are in Delhi. They are paid. It’s a contract, not a full-time government service. It’s a three-year contract.
We want our freedom to be able to say things and I insisted that we don’t want bureaucratic network, we don’t want IAS officers. We want to do it differently. We do networking. We are all doing our thing. We come together every two-three months, spend three full days.
Let me just give you the key areas that we are attacking. E governance, university reform, vocational training, distance learning, primary education, literacy, innovations, translations, libraries, networks, portals — we will have a national portal on water. Energy, education, environment. These are some of the areas we are focused on. And we want really generational transformation in these areas.
How is your focus going to change the current skewed media focus on BPO and outsourcing and the metropolitan cities?
First of all, we need the support of people like you. We need many more young, enlightened, journalists to really bring what we are doing (do the public).
Here’s the thing that bothers me. I am all for changing the license raj, and bringing in the market to serve Indian society where it can. But my real worry is that what we are seeing increasingly in India is essentially a class divide where elites in the metropolitan cities are enjoying the fruits and the media exercise has become a sort of insular navel-gazing where the privileged pay themselves huge salaries and they say everything is hunky dory. Yet vast swathes of India outside the metropolises have remained virtually untouched.
I buy that. I am all with you, I subscribe to your views. I am very concerned about water, literacy, health, rural development. All I am saying is that I want to take that knowledge and make sure that people really transform our quality of life.
Something as simple and stark as the digital divide is a cause for enormous concern. For all the strides in IT, capability of using vernacular Indian languages on the computer remains appalling. Yet nobody is talking about that.
Digital divide is not just a divide of computers, it’s also a divide of literacy. The divide is the divide in education, health, malaria research, it’s not about just computers.
One final question before we wrap up. From what I hear from you, it seems that what your team is doing is not only crafting an independent way of determining India’s knowledge needs, but also along the way creating a separate and independent model of addressing large public policy issues. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Absolutely. To me this is the lifetime job.
More information and contact email, addresses and phone numbers are available at the Knowledge Commission Web site at www.knowledgecommission.org.
|
- Sam Pitroda is the chairman of India’s National Knowledge Commission.
Thursday, September 28, 2006 (Chandigarh):
