Professor Amartaya Sen, the Nobel laureate talked on the theme ‘The Future of Education in 21st Century India: Leveraging demographics for prosperity through enabling policies.' He spoke about the possibility of the IT industry to reach out beyond its principality and about the case for the IT industry to bring its influences beyond what can be seen as its traditional domain

Excerpts:

The idea of what counts as "traditional" is hard to articulate in the case of a field of enterprise as new as information technology.  The importance of information has been acknowledged over many millennia, but the ideas of IT technology and software are quintessential contributions of contemporary modernity - not something with any ageless recognition. 

 Indeed, the entire idea of a National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) would have appeared quite mysterious to the pioneering industrial leader of India.  As it happens, the domain of IT is still evolving, and I would like to argue for taking an even broader view than has already got established.

My point is not that the IT industry should do something for the country at large, for that it does anyway.  It makes enormous contributions: it generates significant incomes for many Indians; it has encouraged attention to technical excellence as a general requirement across the board; it has established exacting standards of economic success in the country; it has encouraged many bright students to go technical rather than merely contemplative; and it has inspired Indian industrialists to face the world economy as a potentially big participant, not a tiny little bit-player.  It can do even more.  This is partly because the reach of information is so wide and all-inclusive, but also because the prosperity and commanding stature of the IT leaders and activists give them voice, power and ability to help the direction of Indian economic and social development.

Let me begin by asking a question that no one here will ask : Why should the Indian IT industry have any sense of obligation to do more things - for India, more than what happens automatically from its normal operations?  Why assume there is any obligation at all for IT to do anything other than minding its own business?

A part of the answer lies in reciprocity.  The country has made huge contributions, even though they are not often clearly recognised, to help the development and flowering of the IT industry in India. How has the country helped? The IT sector has benefited from the visionary move originally championed by Jawaharlal Nehru to develop centres of excellent technical education in India, such as the IITs, to be followed by the Institutes of Management and other initiatives, aimed at enhancing the quality and reach of Indian professional and specialized education.  Despite Nehru's moving rhetoric in favour of literacy for all, he in fact did shockingly little for literacy.  I suggest that Jawaharlal Nehru did not really think through how to ensure the practical realization of his goal of literacy for all, in which he did believe with sincerity and conviction, but not with any sense of practicality.  It was, however, entirely different as far as technical education is concerned - here Nehru's sense of ways and means nicely supplemented his fervent passion.  India was not only the first poor country in the world to choose a robustly democratic form of governance, it also was the first country with grinding poverty to give priority to the development of technical skill and state-of-art education in technology.  And from this the IT sector has benefited a lot, since the entire industry is so dependent on the availability, quality and reach of technical education.

There has been a historic respect for distinctive skills, seeing it even as a social contribution in itself.  Even the nasty caste system, which has so afflicted the possibility of social equity in India, has tended greatly to rely on - and exploit - the traditional reverence for specialized skill, which, in its regimented form, has been used to add to the barriers of societal stratification.  There is a tradition here that can be taken in many different directions, and it is a matter of much satisfaction that the IT industry's use of the same respect is remarkably positive and potentially open and inclusive. 

A few other connections, between the success of IT in India and some particular features of India ‘s past:

Going well beyond respect for specialized skill, there is also a general attitude of openness in India to influences from far and near - of admiring excellence no matter where it is produced.  This is particularly important since the IT success of India did draw initially on what was going on with much accomplishment abroad.  The experiences of Silicon Valley, in particular, were very important for the yearning of skilled and discerning Indians to learn from others - and then to make good use of it.  While many Indians have a deep preference for what we can see as total local immersion and even succumb to evidently strong temptations to denigrate things happening abroad, there has also been for thousands of years a very robust tradition here of admiring, using and learning from excellence anywhere in the world.

The IT technical experts may not readily perceive that there is a remarkable similarity between (1) their own valuational commitment to learn what they can from anywhere which has good ideas to offer, and (2) the open and welcoming attitude to departures originating elsewhere.

It is to the credit of Western centres of excellence in education and practice that they were so welcoming to learners from abroad, but it is also important to see that the interest and initiative of bright Indians to learn from abroad for domestic use was strongly founded on an open-minded willingness to comprehend.

I want to point to one further connection between the development and achievements of Indian IT and the Indian intellectual traditions on which Indian IT draws. Aside from being fascinated by maths, Indian intellectuals have also typically been very excited about arguments in general. IT is a hugely interactive operation and in many ways Indian IT has depended on what we can call TI, that is, "talkative Indians."  It is not hard to see how a tradition of being thrilled by intellectual altercations tends to do a lot to prepare someone to the challenges of IT interactions.

Then, there is, of course, the elementary issue of the obligation of those who "make it" vis-a-vis those who do not manage quite so well, which is a very basic ethical demand that, it can be argued, society places upon us.  This raises immediately the question what any prosperous group may owe to others not so well placed.  This is not only a reflective demand for social deliberation - part of what Immanuel Kant called a "categorical imperative" - but it is also a part of enlightened business operation.  There is a very well established tradition in a part of Indian business to do just that through various socially valuable activities such as building hospitals, research centres and other social institutions of high distinction.  I am impressed to see that many of the major IT leaders seem to be very seized of this challenge.

If that possible role is obvious enough, there is some need to understand better other roles in which the IT industry can make a very big difference in India.  As it happens the key to the success of IT, namely accessibility, systematization and use of information is also very central to social evaluation and societal change.  There is a very foundational connection between information and social obligation, since the moral - and of course the political - need to pay attention to others depend greatly on our knowledge and information about them.

Negligence of suffering of others is sustainable, given human interest in justice and equity, only when we know little about that suffering.  More information in itself goes a long way to breaking that chain of apathy and indifference.

This foundational connection also gives the information industry a huge opportunity to help India by trying to make its contribution to the systematization, digestion and dissemination of diverse clusters of information in India about the lives of the underdogs of society - those who do not have realistic opportunity of getting basic schooling, essential health care, elementary nutritional entitlements, and rudimentary equality across the barriers of class and gender.  This can also be said about problems of under-developed physical infrastructure, as well as social infrastructure that restrain the broad mass of Indians from moving ahead.  There are particular causal connections also here: an enterprise that hugely depends on the excellence of education for its success - as the IT sector clearly does - has good reason to consider its broad responsibility to Indian education in general.

I do not know enough about the IT operations to see whether all this can be turned into a business proposition as well.  But my point is that even if it cannot be so transformed, it is something that the IT sector has good reason to consider doing.  Can there be a group initiative in any of these fields?  Can NASSCOM itself play a catalytic role here? 

I should mention in passing that the role of information and informed under-standing can also be very large in the pursuit of global peace and in defeating ill-reasoned violence.  When we consider how many of the brutalities in the world today are linked with ignorant hostility to cultures and practices abroad, we can appreciate the contribution of informational limitation, among other causal factors, in cross-border belligerence. 

In emphasizing the role of the moral domain for the IT sector to feel some responsibility towards making India a more equitable country, I do not want to give the impression that there is not also a prudential case for going in that direction.  Indian IT has done very well in making excellent use of the global market, but competition there is likely to be increasingly fierce.  Other countries are trying to learn from the experience not only of America and Europe but also from India, and while India has some peculiar advantages in the IT field, the barriers may well be gradually removed even in many poor countries in the world.  

Excessive reliance on private health care in India for the most elementary problems of ill-health and disease is a barrier to the availability and entitlement to health care for all Indians, and this obstacle urgently needs removing.  These are all subjects on which the IT sector is well placed to provide considerable enlightenment and guidance.  But the more immediate - and also the more foundational - reason relates to demands from the moral domain to which the IT sector has reasons to respond.  This is so, I have argued, for a variety of reasons, varying from Indian IT's unequal current success and its debt to India's traditions and priorities, on one side, to - and this is often unrecognised but happens to be extremely important - the central role of information in moral reasoning, on the other.  There is something of a socially connected obligation here, the recognition of which could make a huge difference to the future of India.

These were excerpts from the keynote address at the recently held NASSCOM India Leadership Summit 2007 in Mumbai. 

Tarachand Wanvari, a consulting correspondent for Business Gyan and www.businessgyan.com and looks after the South India desk of www.indiantelevision.com. Feedback at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Issue BG72 Mar07

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