A book that weaves together the personal journey of one of India’s earliest tech entrepreneurs with his role in founding and growing NASSCOM
Not that long ago, we lived in an India where businesses could not run if they followed the rules. Traditional firms were large and family-run, perceived as greedy, self-serving, intent on gaining profits and evading taxes. Corruption was so ingrained that when politicians worked with businesses, they could only do so secretly.
And we were a population that waited patiently for telephone
lines, gas connections and scooters for years at a time – offering them as
tempting dowry components, greasing palms to get ahead in the queue, believing
that things were never going to change because this was our karma.
When did the page turn? When did we start to value professionalism
and aspire to prosperity with a more relaxed confidence? And who or what
pressed the button?
While there is a tacit understanding that the global IT
opportunities were responsible for the social and economic changes of the last
few decades, the transformative role played by NASSCOM has never been properly
acknowledged and this book attempts to do so.
It is a book that weaves together Harish Mehta’s personal
journey, his life as one of India’s earliest tech entrepreneurs, and his role
in founding and growing NASSCOM. And it has received lavish endorsements from
the senior leadership of the corporate world and Indian bureaucracy.
The Maverick Effect walks us through that
soon-to-be-forgotten terrain, a time when INDIAN EXPRESS carried a headline
about ‘Softwear’. A time when a customs officer asked for samples of what was
being exported, Harish Mehta handed him a floppy disk, and the officer thrust a
stapler pin through the disk to attach it to a form, blithely uncaring that he
had ruined it. And once, when a senior bureaucrat was told that the software
business’s potential could be $1 billion, his guffawed retort was, “Young man,
do you know how many zeroes are in one billion?”
Bureaucracy was that nasty barrier which forced young
entrepreneurs into paperwork battles in government offices, draining away
energy that should have been reserved for innovation. However, this book showcases
the many officials who helped achieve their goals, year after year, without a
single incident of bribery. It is equally subjective in documenting the
resistance to NASSCOM’s efforts by MAIT, another more traditional industry
body.
When NASSCOM was established, its aim was government-industry
collaborations that would fuel intelligent economic strategy and give the
Indian IT capability access to world markets. Perhaps what made it unappealing
to powerful lobbyists was that these efforts were never restricted to favoured members
but on benefits for the entire industry. There were bureaucrats who welcomed
this new approach of a level playing field and an ‘India first’ strategy. Even
the dissenters soon saw that when the pie increases in size, each slice is
going to be larger too.
The new culture that developed inadvertently drew from the non-hierarchical
US business environment and its related efficiency, the Jain teachings Harish
Mehta was brought up with, and partly the influence of the European Union where
competing entities collaborate for the greater good. A cohesive team came
together with no personal agenda and a ‘growth mindset’; with no room for
elderly statesmen or a laddering system. What a welcome wind of change!
It was a time of transition when it suddenly felt like the
future had arrived – data transfer that once took days got done in hours! But it
was still an India where a telecom minister might inquire, “Yeh bandwidth kya
cheez hai”. The dawning of India as a ‘technology destination’ took place in
this flurry of opportunity, confusion, continuous activity, and persistent
effort from NASSCOM.
This book also examines larger issues, condensed in time by
the extra-swift passage of this significant historical era. Why were software
services and outsourcing essential to incubate an ecosystem and build a
critical mass before moving to IP-driven output? Would MNCs entering India be
the ruin of us, or help us move to a higher and more stable ground? Were the
Indian engineers working in the US, struggling to cope with an unfamiliar
climate, the lack of domestic help and vegetarian food, the fire-alarms that
rang out when they tried to cook – really stealing jobs or simply enhancing the
efficiency of the US business environment?
One of the most dramatic events this book describes is the
2009 scandal when the gentle and endearing Ramalinga Raju, founder of Satyam
Computer Services, then India’s fourth-largest IT company, stood up and
publicly confessed to a massive accounting fraud. NASSCOM immediately rallied
round to protect Brand India (which it had struggled to establish), ensuring that
Satyam would continue to deliver its client commitments, and forbidding competitors
from poaching.
There is also an in-depth profile of Dewang Mehta, for a
long time the face of NASSCOM but with the kind of personality which made him unpopular
among some. The author’s paean to Dewang’s commitment to growing the Indian
economy through IT, and Dewang’s fundamental patriotism and love for India, is
moving indeed.
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