India, Part Deux

I am writing this from Hong Kong, having just finished my India trip, meeting with IBM Labs, and with IBM current and future customers.  I will discuss the labs in my next post, but a few things struck me as I listened to the customers.

1. The scale of the problems to be tackled is enormous.  One of the banks I visited has hundreds of millions of banking customers, yet, a single transaction might be a few dollars only.  One of the telecoms I visited has plans to have similar order of magnitude wireless customers, yet a single transaction (SMS) might be 2.5 cents retail, and even smaller on wholesale rates.  So while solutions born in the West work when it comes to scale, the price consciousness of a business buyer is extreme.
2. Change happens all around.  As I talked about Dr. Nayak in my previous post, this is an example of a change happening (at least) from the top.  Other changes are brought about by dynamic personalities such as Prof. Phatak of IIT Bombay, that are constantly consulted on problems big and small by the private and public sector. And a huge amount of change happens bottom-up.  It is not just that Indian IT community is optimizing around the low cost design point.  Perhaps having missed a lot of the automation phase that happened in the West, there is a chance for them to leapfrog into a different space.  As an example, in talking with my old colleague, Jai Menon, who is now the CIO and also in charge of Innovation at Bharti Airtel, I realized what a game changer cell phones are in India, even affecting, if not the bottom of the pyramid, then a large portion of the population close to it.

Of course, all of this excitement does not take away from the fact that India continues to be a land of contrasts, and the bottom of the pyramid is not rising fast enough.  I visited a slum in Delhi India, where my dad teaches school going kids -- it was sad to see the poverty, but it was amazing to see the excitements in the kids to learn (an amazing young girl took me aside and requested me to arrange for English teacher because she felt that English is the way forward); and how their parents, in spite of being of extremely modest means, still dress their kids well and in spite of all horror stories of girls being discriminated against, the school was full of very bright, very eager girls of all ages.