IT Pie in the Sky?

In the course of the month of October 1999, while elections and military rule and other political tamasha kept our sub-continent busy, I kept busy in a different way. Living off airline food, partly due to my passion for motoring and partly on business, I managed to fly ten sectors by air within India. Delhi-Chennai-Bangalore-Delhi, Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi, Delhi-Bhopal-Mumbai-Delhi and, for good measure, another Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi. This is not to say that I can afford the atrociously high price for domestic air travel, but work is work.

As an aside, a Delhi-Chennai-Bangalore-Delhi ticket would cost almost the same as a Delhi-Kuala Lumpur/Singapore-Delhi ticket which, if routed properly, would take me via Chennai outbound and via Bangalore returning. But that is not all that is amazing.

The amazing point about these travels short of hyper space was that on every sector except one (Chennai to Bangalore, surprisingly) I found myself sitting next to somebody from the information technology industry. There was a French computer software firm manager, on his way to Bhopal to find programmers, logic being that if he went to a non-English speaking area he would find people with an open mindset on learning another language as long as they had some basic computer skills. On one Delhi-Mumbai flight I was surrounded by a brat-pack of nattering youngsters, on their way to catch a connecting flight towards the far Australian shores, looking forward to a life as back-room data entry people. Or the young industrialist from Indore, connecting Bhopal-Indore-Mumbai and heading for Europe as well as “the valley” to move his java business and we weren’t talking the tasteless brew served onboard by our very own Indian Airlines.

On the last flight, when I thought I finally had the system beat, I found myself next to a manager from Tatas. Here, I thought, somebody selling steel or tea or maybe even cars. Nope, Oracle, would you like to check out what 8-I can do, at midnight on the post-alcoholic haze fuelled flight that takes off from Mumbai at 11pm, I get the authoritative word. On database management. As a new convert, I listen. While the sub-Continent slides past 33,000 feet underneath, dark and fast asleep mainly in huts where the inhabitants are still living lives of misery as they felt they were ordained to, I listen to an intense voice telling me about the deep and dark secrets of data mining.

Where is the real world? To find out, I get out of it on a weekday, my head is full of everything I wanted to say but never put down on paper and I need out. Out is a couple of round trips as bus-driver, I possess a totally fake and illegal heavy duty motor vehicle licence with a public service endorsement to operate city buses. For the bus itself, I get in touch with my ex-employee Jha, who now operates four private buses running on government controlled routes within Delhi. He charges rates about 20% below the competing state owned bus on the same route and turns in a healthy profit, he drives a bigger car than I do.

And on the back of his bus is a huge kite-shaped advertisement for one of India’s latest ISP.

So I ask Jha, hey Jha, he used to be the hard-working though un-lettered office all odd jobs and more kind of guy who you marked because he never wanted to go home, home was a shanty room he shared with half a dozen of his countrymen. While family was somebody he went and checked out twice a year to send “mother hailing, father ailing, wife wailing, child failing and self mailing medical certificate for extension of leave” kind of letters. Happiness was being permitted to sleep in the office. With the A/c on throughout the night.

I said, “Hai ree Jha jee, kyaa yeh sub lagay baithe ho busvaa ke peeche mein, kyaa talukat hai diesel or horunva se?” (I say old chap Jha, what is all this you’ve got stuck on the rear of the bus, what does it have to with diesel and horns?)

And therein lies a tale, flapping in the winds like a lighthouse in the sky. The same Jha would force his school going kids to listen to the English News on television so that they could speak like the sahib-log. Now the kids, three boys, were grown up, the elder one moving on towards college. And there, one evening, as they sat in their one electricity point per family stolen from the line overhead as you paid a monthly rent kind of living room, came a demand.

“I need to study computer”. Mother nods her head, she never even went to a school. Jha jee reads the newspapers like everybody else, full of nothing but study computer. And what better way to help pay for it, than by accepting mobile bill-boards? And Jha jee tells me, it is now not just in big cities, but all over India. Get on to the info highway using public transport, if you please, the guys who ride private transport already know about it.

But there is more! The driver and conductor have a sheaf of pamphlets on computer classes organised by one of the biggest names. Instructions are to spot likely candidates and hand them one as they enter the bus and also while they are leaving. Talk about hard-sell, Jha was putting spam to shame without even knowing about it. And for their efforts, the Hindi speaking driver and conductor, 4th or 5th pass, were getting “speaking English” lessons. Something is on in North India, cow-belt, land of the anti-English, and we didn’t know about it? Never made the English press, you see.

Suddenly it is all over the place. Logic is that with an investment of about one-sixth of that for the cheapest taxi, you can start work from home while you also run your taxi. More so, your wife and children can do something, too. Purists jump up and say, oh this is back to the East India Company, we are producing an army of clerks again. Man on street, smarter, says, hey, economic empowerment is way to social empowerment, and, if in the bargain, the stay at home model of women shape up, haven’t we, in India, arrived?

And the beauty is that it seems to be working. Word is out, learn computers, or perish.

This may look like a very simplistic model, and if it can be done in India it can be done in Pakistan, too, but don’t some of us remember the home-knitting machines that brought fortune start-ups for many big exporters today from the North? Or the pappad co-operatives in the West, the milk co-operatives everywhere?

In India, we live in a society where the economy and ideals support the small guy, where we have a fairly healthy dis-respect for the law and where we also have this great streak of individualism in everything and everyone. The computer revolution has arrived in a big way in small-town India, and it will soon be the dominant economy force. Maybe initially business-to-business and business-to-consumer, but eventually consumer-to-consumer. Because the internet and the home computer, taken together, support the underground economy while showing the authorities a royal finger like nothing else did before. Can you imagine, whole ranges of small scale industries with regional strengths and national affiliations, beating the system in a no-excise, no sales-tax and positively thinner margins kind of game? A few million Singapore and Hong Kong, emerging from the same gene pool which runs these city states and other duty free empires worldwide? Las Palmas in the Canaries will be nothing compared to the reach here.

And the best part is, this may well be the tool to economically and socially empower Pakistan also. What law, religious or social, will be able to forbid women from riding a keyboard to a new high? How will the small towns remain forever in awe of their metro cousins?

Point is, there is a new flight planned on a route nobody felt would justify the traffic. It goes Delhi-Indore-Pune-Bangalore-Chennai and back, every day. It has been nick-named the IT flight. Already.