From Tryst to Tendulkar: The History of Independent India

by Balaji Viswanathan

  Imagine the potential it has for humanity if India could launch hundreds of inexpensive missions in our search for alternative life forms and alternative planets. Four years ago, India helped confirm that there is water on the moon - the confirmation of which has eluded global researchers for five decades. This mission sent to detect methane could be the start of a new life for Indian science. Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya would be really proud of the lads who worked on this mission.

  India needs its Renaissance. We have to start breaking the chain of poverty by thinking outside the box. That would mean boldly assertive. People in other walks of life can surely draw inspiration from our scientists. This day is so refreshing although I have zero connection with anything ISRO did. If we can reach Mars, we can do anything - from politics and the arts to science and sports.

  India's Nuclear Program

  As long as the world is constituted as it is, every country will have to devise and use the latest devices for its protection. I have no doubt India will develop her scientific researches and I hope Indian scientists will use the atomic force for constructive purposes. But if India is threatened, she will inevitably try to defend herself by all means at her disposal.

  -- Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, 26 June 1946

  India's nuclear program had a near parallel trajectory to the space program. They both shared some scientists through their history. For instance, Dr. Abdul Kalam is an important figure in both these establishments.

  After the Americans went nuclear with Trinity test in July 1945, other major nations followed. Russians tested in 1949, UK in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964. This put a lot of pressure on Indians to have their own nuclear weapons program.

  The key person who built the program was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a Cambridge educated Nuclear physicist from the Parsi community who is related to the famous Indian industrial family, Tata. Bhabha was vociferous in building a nuclear program and even three years before India got independence, he outlined a three point nuclear program for India:

  Build Uranium based pressurized heavy water reactors that would generate enough Plutonium.

  Build Fast Breeder Reactor that would use the Plutonium mixed with Uranium to generated more Plutonium. Thorium would be slowly introduced.

  Build fully self-sustaining Thorium reactors.

  This staged approach would allow India to tap its vast reserves of cheap Thorium, in place of the imported, rarer Uranium that is subject to severe restrictions. However, 70 years since the original plan India never went past stage 2. This has forced the Indian government to delay its plans for moving to Thorium and explore alternative nuclear deals.

  Putting the Plan to Action

  In 1949, the Indian ambassador to China proposed an economic development plan to the West that would slow down the expansion of Communism in Asia. This plan was formalized in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo and it included a big assistance by the West, led by the United States, in promoting the economy and research facilities in a group of Commonwealth countries in Asia.

  As a part of this Colombo plan, India got a 40 MW experimental nuclear reactor - CIRUS (Canada-India-Reactor-United States) that was primarily funded by Canada with heavy water [needed for the nuclear energy transfer] supplied by the United States. It was set up in Trombay in the outskirts of the metropolis of Bombay. This reactor was 40 times more powerful than the first Indian reactor - Apsara - built on the same location with the help of the United Kingdom.

  The reactor produced weapons grade Plutonium as a byproduct. This could be used for nuclear weapons. Since there was no international body such as the IAEA for ensuring the safeguarding the fuel usage, the US and Canada just put the peace requirement in the contract, but trusted India to abide by its side of the contract.

  Canadian collaboration at CIRUS was followed by another Canadian collaboration for setting up a much bigger 200 MW reactor in Kota, Rajasthan. India soon built its first nuclear reactor at Tarapur, a little north of Bombay, and that still remains India's largest nuclear power station.

  Buddha Smiles - Moving to Nuclear Weapons

  By 1958, Nehru was getting quite uneasy by the growing number of nuclear powered nations and authorized Project Phoenix that would build a Plutonium processing plant at Trombay. A third of the research budget at defense department went to fund the nuclear program.

  However, the wars in 1962 [with China] and 1965 [with Pakistan] took both the time and attention off the nuclear program as it was still far away from producing a nuclear weapon. The premature death of Bhabha in 1966, under mysterious circumstances has impaired India's nuclear progress a bit. Bhabha's successor, Vikram Sarabhai didn't show as much interest in nuclear weapons due to the conflicts with his personal faiths.

  In 1967, Indira Gandhi restarted the project. It was spearheaded by Raja Ramanna - who designed the nuclear device, Homi Sethna who processed the plutonium and assisted by PK Iyengar in putting the plutonium plant. The secret plant Purnima was set up in 1969. The 1971 war with Pakistan once again slowed down the progress.

  Finally, the time had come on the 18th of May 1974. In the deserts of Pokhran in Rajasthan in Western India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took India nuclear with a single 8kT device.

  The world reaction was a mix of shock and confusion. The US and USSR condemned, but in a more mellow way. France congratulated and later withdrew. Canada felt the most angst as it was its reactors that were used to produce the Plutonium.

  However, the launch of India's first satellite and the imposition of a state of emergency within months of the tests, hardened the world stance. Things seemed to happen too quickly and for the outside world there seemed to be a hidden connection. There was a fear that Indira was taking India on a path that many rogue dictators elsewhere in the world did. India became a nuclear Pariah and Western cooperation ended when it comes to the space and nuclear programs.

  Pokhran II

  The sanctions that came after the first nuclear program, slowed India's progress a bit. In the following two decades, India didn't perform any more tests and stressed hard on the peaceful nature of the program. Although India planned a few tests in the early 1990s, Prime Minister Rao caved under US pressure as any new sanctions would put further pressure on the newly opening up economy.

  In the spring of 1998, the conservatives under Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to power and lost no time in taking India to the next stage. Within weeks of taking office, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee authorized Operation Shakti - with three nuclear tests on May 11 and two more on May 13. India initially claimed the success of its hydrogen bomb along with a couple of micro weapons. This is a matter of controversy. But, the fact remained that India has now become a serious nuclear power.

  Expectedly, the US imposed sanctions. But, the Indian economy had matured by this stage and within a couple of years the US had to back down. Technology collaboration started resuming in the early 2000s, culminating in the Nuclear 1-2-3 deal of 2005.

  For India, the nuclear weapons became a necessity as it felt surrounded by the US allies of Pakistan, China, and the Soviets.

  * * *

  Chapter 14: Rice, Cow and Zero: Ancient Indian Triumvirate in new Revolutions

  Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam.

  - 5th century Indian Mathematician Aryabhata heralding the modern place value system in Mathematics

  Fine, but first we want you to outsource $10 million of I.T. software work to India.

  -- Sam Pitroda to Jack Welch [head of GE], 1989

  If I kiss your cheek, what do I get in return?

  -- Jack Welch

  What we [TCS] learned out of [the relationship with GE] is phenomenal.

  -- S. Ramadorai, CEO of TCS

  September 1989

  Jack Welch, who headed the world's largest company, General Electric, was in New Delhi trying to find a market for his products in the growing economy. He was looking to sell airplane engines to India's government owned airlines and machinery to other g
overnment enterprises.

  The government headed by Rajiv Gandhi was finishing its term and heading into Parliamentary elections. The government sent its technology advisor to meet Mr. Welch and secure something for India. Mr. Sam Pitroda (original name Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda) is a telecommunication expert who came to the US as a student and grew up rapidly in the 1970s telecom expansion in the US. In 1984, he got invited by Rajiv Gandhi to help India's telecom policy.

  Mr. Pitroda was a shrewd negotiator who understood American businesses and salesmen. He knew Jack Welch had a lot to gain from the sale of engines and other equipment to India. Pitroda offered to provide those opportunities to GE in return for GE setting up an IT outsourcing center in India.

  * * *

  It was a Crazy Time in India.

  A relative of mine [mentioned in one of the previous chapters] was a top exec at GE India who at the time appeared on the cover of the prestigious Fortune magazine. Out of nowhere, he joined as a college grad and went to the top of his organization using this new move of GE. I have distinct childhood memories of the feeling whenever we visited his home in Delhi. It was like entering a new world - a home built completely a replica of top notch homes in the US. The car was a Toyota coupe, imported from the US [with a left hand drive].

  When Bill Gates visited India in 1995 to launch Windows 95, India's local media could not stop talking about him. Every newspaper for that whole month carried news about Microsoft and Bill Gates. In my 8th standard class, my classmates were spending all evening programming in our new computer lab. My dad would read me stories of how programmers were changing lives all over the world. Talk of software was everywhere in the town.

  The school teacher who taught us the programming language C++ in 9th standard got an offer to join an American company - making 100 times what he made as a school teacher. It was something unheard of. It looked as though anyone who can write 10 lines of code could be making the fortune of a lifetime.

  The events were both exhilarating and disorienting.

  * * *

  Back to New Delhi.

  For Welch, this was just a minor irritant. He didn't want to scuttle a deal with the Indian government and didn't have much hope out of this new center. At worst, it will be a few waste of a couple of million dollars of investment.

  GE formed a number of partnerships with local companies such as TCS and Wipro. These were fledgling tech companies that were doing simple tech work at a very small scale. Wipro until then was an industrial company creating a range of products from Jasmine toilet soap to industrial cylinders [until early 1990s, Wipro was still making consumer goods such as talcum powders and baby soaps]. TCS was part of the Tata Conglomerate, set up to improve automation at its steel plants.

  The deal to build technology for the world's largest corporation was a blessing sent from the heaven to these companies. The joint venture Wipro GE Medical Systems Pvt. Ltd enabled the outsourcing of medical imaging to India. TCS came up with its own deal and soon was joined by Satyam.

  GE was quite impressed by the results of its initial outsourcing experiment and soon a flood of outsourcing orders came - in financial services, call support centers, and data processing. Other companies such as IBM and Accenture followed the lead of GE. In the meanwhile, Indian domestic companies learned the best practices and started getting on a rapid expansion drive.

  By the late 1990s, the scare of the Y2K bug took India to the next stage. When computing systems were designed in the 1970s, year column in the databases got only two digits to represent. The early designers wanted to save the crucial storage space and 2000 was too far to worry about. However, by the late 1990s, computer architects realized that the turn of the century would completely cause chaos in their systems. Represented with just two digits, 2000 will be written as 00 causing a confusion with 1900.

  Newspapers ran horror stories about how missiles loaded with nuclear weapons could be triggered due to this date confusion [most of such worries were over hyped nonsense, partly even pushed by the companies most likely to benefit from redesigning the systems]. As every major corporation in the world was rapidly going through every part of their database to add the two extra digits, Indian companies came into the picture. They offered to do that trivial job and monopolized the whole market. By 2000, India's IT companies were left with a massive network of relationships with major corporations all over the world.

  Services Revolution - a Perfect Storm for India

  In the early 1990s, the US tech market was rapidly exploding due to the dot-com boom. Talent was very scarce and salaries in technology shot through the roof. Companies thus outsourced all the low level work.

  As we saw in earlier chapters, India opened up its economy in 1991 that paved the way for a rapid engagement of India with the world. Tech companies were positioned right to utilize the massive growth in an economy that was to come.

  Educated Indians spoke English, due to the legacy of British rule. This was in stark contrast to other rapidly growing Asian economies. American and British companies could outsource service work without much issue.

  Telecom revolution allowed the possibility of video conferencing and remote management of teams. Data could now move on the information highways of the world, with relative ease.

  In the 1980s, many Indian states, especially the ones in south India opened dozens of new engineering colleges. The engineers who came out of these were immediately tapped by the tech companies.

  The governments of India, both in center and at the state levels were pro-tech. This is especially true of southern states like Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Thus, these states began commanding a bulk of the software deals.

  India's natural strengths and core competencies aligned right. Indians had a strong flair for mathematics since the ancient era and programming is a natural extension of mathematics. Indians were highly used to speaking multiple languages in a nation of 20+ officially recognized languages. This helped them travel the world and get consulting contracts. Finally, the chaos of the nation and the diversity of the culture helped Indians be flexible and have a hacker mindset, necessary to succeed in the software industry.

  Sixteen centuries ago, when the Gupta era Mathematician Aryabhatta came up with the place value system and the usage of zero to develop the modern decimal system, he might not have realized that his descendents would be using that to build India's future. In 1980, India's software exports was a mere $4 million. In 2014-15, Indian software exports are estimated to be about $100 billion - a 25,000 times jump.

  Emergence of Bangalore as India’s Silicon Valley

  Tech capitals don't come out of the blue. In the case of Silicon Valley, the US government poured an enormous sum of money in building the tech backbone for their own defense needs. Out came as a result was India’s Silicon Valley. India tried somewhat replicating that in the case of Bangalore.

  Stage 1: Setting up the Tata Institute - Swami Vivekananda inspires JN Tata

  In 1893, one of India's most popular reformist figures, Swami Vivekananda was returning from a popular trip to the world fair in Chicago.

  During the return journey to India, a star entrepreneur, Jamsetji Tata [the founder of Tata group], met the Swami in the ship. Their dialogue must have been stunning enough for Tata to start an institute.

  I trust, you remember me as a fellow-traveler on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very much recall at this moment your views on the growth of the ascetic spirit in India, and the duty, not of destroying, but of diverting it into useful channels.

  I recall these ideas in connection with my scheme of Research Institute of Science for India. Do you think you would care to apply yourself to the mission of galvanizing into life our traditions in this respect?

  - Jamsetji Tata

  Sir Ramsay likes Bangalore

  India's then viceroy, Lord Curzon liked this idea of a research university and forwarded the proposal to the Royal Society of London. There, William Ramsay,
who won the Nobel Prize for discovering noble gases, was tasked with finding a suitable location. Sir Ramsay toured around India and suggested the southern city of Bangalore. He found the elevation of 4500 ft offered a very moderate climate of neither cool nor warm & thus suitable for scientific exploration.

  Ruled by a great ruler

  More than just the climate, the region was ruled by the legendary Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV who was really passionate about education. He was probably one of the best monarchs in India & really a technophile. The kingdom was already ruled by great kings like Tipu Sultan, who understood the value of technology. He also had a great Diwan [Prime Minister] in K. Seshadri Iyer and later Visvesvaraya who both helped setup great institutions.

  Together the monarch & his Diwans built a great many things, including Shivanasamudra Falls [Asia's first hydropower plant], University of Mysore, Mysore Medical College, State bank of Mysore, Lalith Mahal palace etc.

  Wadiyar gave 372 acres of prime land in the center of the city free of cost to setup the new research institution. In 1933, the institute got its first Indian director the Nobel winning C. V. Raman, under whom the institute went to great heights.

  This institution, later renamed as Indian Institute of Science, would become the core of Indian research for a century or more. It sort of became the Stanford for India's silicon valley & powered Bangalore.

  Stage 2: Indian government invests gobbles of money

  The region around Bangalore - Mysore state was a well run state with a high level of education investment and availability of abundant electricity through the hydropower projects.