Comfortably numb thinking small

Chalta hai!

Indians in India are too easily satisfied. We’re happy with small wins. We optimize for the immediate future. We think only for ourselves, and not for our fellow humans, forget country. It’s the easy, lazy option. We get immediate gratification, and the government its daily headlines. We’re lulled into our comfort zones.

Thinking small makes us comfortably numb.

The IITs are the world’s best engineering colleges. The revered Mr. NRN takes pride that it’s easier to get into Cornell, Princeton, MIT than it is to get into the IITs. Every year we select, train, and produce remarkably smart engineers and entrepreneurs who create world-class products and companies. What we forget to mention is that most of these Indian prodigies went on to head Google, IBM, MasterCard, Microsoft, Adobe, Pepsi, Unilever, to name a few. More generally Indian origin talent is now driving American politics, the British economy, and countless other high-impact positions. Our mainline media keeps celebrating these success stories without realizing the biting irony: We produce and export world-class talent. We can’t harness this talent to serve India.

You may argue that Infosys, TCS, Wipro are home-grown success stories. They create millions of jobs, earn billions in revenues, and reward Indian shareholders handsomely. Yet, we miss the fact that their global clients who use these firms’ services derive far more value than the fees they pay to say Infosys. Check what portion of IT firms’ revenues comes from outside India and apply a rough yardstick of 10X the economic value created for these clients. We produce and export excellent services cheaply. We can’t convert these services into innovation that serves India.

Billions of dollars of venture capital have created hundreds of soonicorns, unicorns, decacorns, and every other four-legged animal conceivable. They build compelling apps that millions of users enjoy, and solve real problems in commerce, payments, transportation, logistics, to name a few areas. What we don’t realize is that Google controls this attention economy with the underlying OS, distribution, and monetization platform. Increasingly, our digital ecosystem is at the mercy of the 21st Century East India Company.

There’s much brouhaha about incentives for smartphone contract manufacturing. A few global contract manufacturers are cautiously looking at India as a China + Vietnam + 1 hedge. We forget that we import high-value components, add cheap labor, and export finished products, getting about $10 at best on a $1,000 iPhone. We can’t harness this low-cost labor to create products or services that serve India. Nokia tried for a while in Sriperumbudur, before the tax guys caught up to extract hafta.

There’s hoopla around the latest Datacentre Policy. Wise minds have opined that data being the new oil, datacentres are the new oil rigs; ergo, India needs to grab this opportunity fast. Nothing wrong with that, until you realize land, facilities, power, cooling, etc., are a trifling piece of the massive value chain that AWS, Google, and Microsoft straddle. We can set up massive datacentres to serve global cloud providers. We can’t harness the same resources to create hyper-scale cloud service providers in India for India.

I could go on and on, but I’ve made my point.

Instead, we could think big and bold:

Mandate that the country’s graduates serve a 3-year stint working for Indian government or business on clear deliverables before they’re eligible to go abroad, Doesn’t Singapore have a similar system?

Government and bureaucracy create a paid internship program with clearly defined problem statements and outcomes that this talent can solve. There is no dearth of citizen-scale problems to solve in India across healthcare, financial inclusion, urban infrastructure, rural employability.

We finally make up our mind about technology, tax, and financial regulation, and give investors the confidence to make long-term bets on Indian entrepreneurs. Not the kinds that raise big money at insane valuations to make offbeat ads that not everyone gets. Instead, what would it take to create an entrepreneur who finds a cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s? Or create breakthrough solutions to make renewable energy as pervasive as and cheaper than fossil fuels? AI that reports facts and data without bias and removes the need for toxic mainline media? Or an automated triaging and decisioning system that unclogs our judiciary?

The choice is ours

We’re Indians. Among the smartest brains on the planet. With limitless and diverse natural resources. The largest open market and the largest economically productive demography in the world. We can’t be complacent with 8% growth and empty rhetoric of a $5T economy. We can’t keep waiting for the government to have all the solutions. It’s time we looked beyond our petty self-interest, demand more of ourselves, and think big. What we demand legitimately, the government is bound to enable.

Thinking small is a self-limiting vicious cycle that eventually concentrates power in the hands of a few.

Thinking big is a self-expanding virtuous cycle that progressively includes everyone in prosperity.

The choice is ours.

Standard disclaimers apply:

1. This article is a personal opinion, and not that of any of my employers — past, present, or future.

2. I don’t have a particular left-wing or right-wing political ideology. It takes both wings to fly.