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India's Time
The Air India 747 from London is about to land at Mumbai, the great seaport of western India which used to be called Bombay. “Please fasten your seat belts and adjust your watches to local time which is 5 ½ hours in advance of GMT.” Yes 5 ½ hours. India shares the distinction of a half hour time zone differential along with Iran and Kabul, Newfoundland and central Australia. India’s determination to be different is due to its desire to be accurate. The country that claims to have invented time does not settle for the generalizations accepted by other countries in their time zone calibrations. After all, in 1727 the most accurate sundial in the world was built in Jaipur. The Samrat Yantra is a massive 89-foot high, 148-foot wide structure of masonry and marble that casts a shadow moving at a precise and measurable 0.08 inch per second. “Its accuracy,” said its builder Raja Sawai Singh II, “is due to its size and the fact that it has no moving parts.” This incredible instrument personifies the Indian talents for accuracy and math.
India is on the brink of a new age of greatness and contribution to the progress of mankind. It is India’s time. The age of technology is seeing to that.
In 1989 Swissair started doing its data processing in India. With the ability to fly in its paper work on daily flights to Bombay the transfer of information onto computer processed records by a group of Indian IT trained data entry experts was determined to be a highly effective way to complete a routine but exacting task. “The Indian penchant for accuracy turned out to be perfect for this role”, said Swiss born Hans-Peter Doser, General Manager for India and Nepal for Swissair. “We had a minimal error rate which was unheard of in our European and North American experience”. Doser started a remarkable and successful experiment in global data facilitation based in Mumbai. In what he called “IT enabling”
The early success of the venture prompted other airlines, banks, credit-card companies and retail operations to use the Swissair service to the extent that the operation grew to employing over 500 data processing personnel and other IT professionals taken from Indian universities. Swissair’s data processing plant was one of the first homegrown Indian employers where jobs were created at home for some of the country’s top scholastic achievers rather than joining India’s ever growing “brain-drain”.
“Next”, says Hans-Peter “was the huge opportunity to take advantage of innovative technology and the transfer of images across the Internet using our capability to download in digital format. This was especially suitable for our Bombay operation. We believe that the Indian people have an unusual capability to think with both sides of the brain, unlike most people from western cultures. Their unique skill at being able to see an image and have no problem in visualizing it’s conversion into digital form has lead to a future for specialized computer services where the sky is the limit”.
Any visitor to India who marvels at the awe inspiring Taj Mahal and then sees the mathematics of its construction and optical illusions, must recognize that what Doser is saying is right. Here is a phenomenal example of digital process being visualized as a thing of infinite beauty.
In a country where history is so profound and so evident, where ancient tradition, culture, religion and way of life is bound up with unquenchable beliefs and are all one, it is hard to realize that India has had its freedom for only 57 years. It 1947 that the British Raj folded its tent and gave India her independence. Before the British it was dominated by the great Islamic builders, the Moghuls, who arrived in the 15th century. Before that it was the Rajputs and the Sultinates which takes us back to the later years of the first millennium. As an independent, free-thinking, free-standing nation, it’s a young country filled with entrepreneurial traders and salesmen of unremitting persistence (as anyone who has walked 10 yards down a city street will attest). Sometimes referred to as the largest democracy on Earth and sometimes as the only democracy because of its high poll turnout, India is ready and willing to do business. Its time has come.
India’s economy ranks 14th in the global ratings, larger than Russia, Mexico and Taiwan but smaller than Netherlands and Spain. According to “The Economist” it is the 5th largest economy by purchasing power. What often defies understanding is the fact that it has the world’s second largest population (close to a billion) in a land mass approximately one-third the size of the United States. It’s three largest cities are listed in the twenty most populace cities in the world with Mumbai at almost 16 million, Calcutta 12.2 million and Delhi at 10.5 million.
The United States is the main importer of goods and services from India at nearly 12% of the US total imports. America is also India’s principal export destination taking almost 19% of its total exports. These figures put to rest any attitude that India and America have a cold relationship.
Infosys Technology is a 24 year old software company based in Bangalore, India’s so called capital of high tech. Infosys was the first Indian company to be listed on Nasdaq and it has opened the doors to many other companies which are fast moving into world-class standard in the IT industry. During the past 10 years the sector has expanded at an annual rate of more than 60%. And includes the extraordinary and fast growing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service industry which has been the focus of recent political debate on the export of American jobs. Who would have thought even ten years ago that high-tech India would be the worry of American politicians in an election year? The National Task Force on Information Technology reports that high tech exports from India could reach $50 billion by the year 2008, some say this figure is ultra conservative.
Anyone who visits India and meets the educated, English speaking, smart and sophisticated young people who are fast rising in the countries teeming businesses will come to the conclusion that they are in a country looking forward to unprecedented growth.
It seems hardly possible that it has been only 14 years since that Hans-Peter Doser first recognized the digital future of the Indian sub continent
Whatever direction you approach India whether it be from East, West or North you will have to adjust your watch to its unique time. There is no doubt about it, now is India’s Time.
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