India

by Patrick French

  I walked to the heart of the site and entered one of Brigade Gateway’s apartment blocks. The staircase was half built, and I was able to climb nearly to the top of the tall building. All around, across the skyline, grey shells were rising. These were two- and three-bedroom apartments, and workers from West Bengal were running water pipes between them. They said they were paid Rs150 (or around $3) a day, but that the contractor or gangmaster who employed them took one quarter of their salary illegally. I watched as these men dragged and winched and hammered and drilled, in their plastic sandals. The quality of the construction was fairly good, but I was puzzled by a small box-room on the outside of each apartment, less than 2 metres square, which was accessible only from the common staircase. Was it a storage or wiring closet? No, it was the servant’s room. Each apartment would need a servant, and this was where he or she would be living, without windows or fresh air.

  Back at the main gate I asked Dhruv where the hundreds of labourers lived, and he offered to take me to what he called a housing colony, as he was nearing the end of his shift. Three big companies were responsible for the main construction project at Brigade Gateway. We went to see the accommodation that was used by the workers of one of these companies, Simplex Infrastructures. It was off a road about fifteen minutes’ walk from the construction site, and it was here that I had a shock. Indian cities are full of slums and bad housing, but this was in a special category of its own.

  It was reasonably easy to get inside. Dhruv had assumed that because I was white and quite smartly dressed, I must be on official business, while the guard at the colony let me in because I was with Dhruv. The place stank of rotting food and latrines, and amounted to little more than a network of paths awash with grey water, which led to sheds made of wood and corrugated iron. This was where the labourers lived for months or even years at a time. Most were at work, and the few who were there were either sick or resting. They came originally from Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and had been recruited in their villages to come south as workers. In each case, they told me a contractor was holding their wages and taking a large cut. But, as a listless teenage boy from Buxar named Prem said, “What can we do? We can do nothing. My family don’t even know where I am.” Prem showed me inside the sheds. There was no electricity, so I used the light on my mobile phone to look around (the cheaper Indian mobiles, like the one I had, usefully contain a flashlight). The concrete floor was lined with thin plastic mats, like beach mats, each one about the size of a single mattress, and at the head of each mat were some folded blankets and washing utensils.

  “Is this where you sleep?” I asked Prem, who was wrapped in a red blanket and shivering with fever.

  He assented.

  “Two persons sleep on each mat,” said Dhruv.

  “Two? At the same time?”

  “Yes,” said Dhruv. “We sleep close together.”

  Above the mats were lines of rough string, hanging across the shed. Little pictures of deities and religious places were propped in the webs of string. Each man had a length on which to hang his own clothes and possessions. This was his sacred thread, the nearest thing he had to privacy. It was not difficult to imagine the atmosphere in the colony each evening when the workers returned: the hunger, the exhaustion, the arguments, the fights, the exploitation, the constant stink of sewage, the trips to cheap drinking dens and the brothels by the nearby garment factory, and the nightly return to the shared plastic mat. I was outraged by the conditions here, because they were so easily avoidable. This was not an embedded social problem where any solution might throw up a host of new complaints. It was not a case of intractable poverty or of bosses who were unable to pay their workers more. The cheapest apartments in Brigade Gateway were selling at just under Rs10m ($200,000), and for the cost of few square metres in one apartment, for the cost of a servant’s closet, these migrant labourers could have been built proper accommodation. When I asked Dhruv if all the workers at Brigade Gateway had to live in such conditions, he said this colony was probably the worst. Some other housing colonies had bunks with mattresses.

  I contacted the company, Simplex, and asked some basic questions about the arrangements for the workers. Nobody wanted to be interviewed. Eventually they responded through a third party: “Mr. French’s letter is a little embarrassing for us, and I don’t think we will be making any kind of response. He says he has visited our site, and yet the only thing he would like to know is how much we pay our labourers. He has no interest in the structure, or how it is being built, or how long it will take to construct. He is writing about India and I do not understand why he needs to know how much we pay our labourers. How is it related to his subject matter? So, we would not like to respond.”10

  The tone of the reply was familiar, pursuing the old-fashioned line that anyone who asks why people are being mistreated is seeking to hold India back. I learned that the company’s managing director, B. D. Mundhra, was considered a devotee of traditional values. His office produced a pamphlet stating he was the co-editor of Indian Culture: Encyclopaedic Survey in Eight Volumes. The theme of the volumes was Hindu universality: “The Rishis or savants of yore looked upon the whole world, inhabited by one large family. Another Vedic axi[o]m compares the world to a vast nest of which we are the nestlings singing melodious tunes creating an exquisite symphony.”11

  The workers at Brigade Gateway might find better jobs, or worse ones. Like Venkatesh, they had little reason for hope. Yet all around us, and particularly around the huge city of Bangalore, with a mushroom cloud of success emanating from its software and telecom industries, was evidence that India was on the move. How were these workers to join the journey? Was the leap to prosperity and social change only possible for a minority? The question I was left with was: how many generations would it take to turn a junior Venkatesh into a software engineer?

  There can be a remarkable dissonance in India between the efficiency of everyday life (high-speed service in a dhaba, a shopkeeper who mends your broken phone on the spot) and the inertia of officials. A while ago I attended a small conference in New Delhi organized by the Indian and British foreign ministers. Naively, I had expected high-level incarnations of government to be different, but the state remained the state: we were in the world of the babu. The sound system did not work and my name was misspelt in as many as three different ways: Partik, Patrik and Partick. The organization of the 2010 Commonwealth Games was similarly chaotic.

  India’s software and computer industries benefited from the lack of bureaucratic intervention, although in the first years after independence they were given encouragement. In the early 1940s, long before he was asked to plan the Indian economy, P. C. Mahalanobis set up a business in Calcutta which fabricated calculating machines and scientific instruments. Using recycled components and material from a junkyard, the company made a manually operated calculator that could solve linear equations. Nehru had a look at it during a visit to the Indian Statistical Institute in 1953 and was interested by the idea that machines could be helpful in analysing statistical data. When the institute wanted to import a foreign computer that could perform 200 additions or five multiplications per second, and took up a large air-conditioned room, he supported the proposal.12 Nehru’s belief in an India with strong scientific institutions was linked in his mind to the importance of new technology. Mahalanobis obtained a Ural computer from the Soviets and an American IBM 1401, which was then the world’s most popular model. In the 1950s the nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha organized the building of an analog computer at his Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, as well as developing Asia’s first atomic research reactor at Trombay—Nehru was so impressed by the blue light given off by the fuel core in a tank of water that he named the project Apsara, after a mythological maiden or water nymph.13 By the time Indira Gandhi became prime minister, scientific teams were making use of computer technology in various spheres across India.

  At the same time, politicians were suspicious. What were c
omputers for? They had not been needed in the past, so why should they be needed in the future? In a debate in Parliament in 1967, the communist leader K. Anirudhan warned about a new menace that was threatening India: “The automation equipments that are being imported into this country on a very wide scale include those frighteningly monstrous machines called electronic computers. What is an electronic computer? Is it like any other conventional machine? No, sir. I would rather quote from Time magazine … ‘When someone wishes to solve a problem, he defines the problem in computer language. As instructions are fed into the computer in this special language, the machine sends electrical impulses coursing through its innards at the speed of light.’ An IBM 7093 computer can do one day’s desk work of a lakh [100,000] of clerks in less than an hour … this Government is bringing in these machines into this country on a very liberal scale.”14 George Fernandes shared Anirudhan’s worry, and as industry minister in the Janata government in 1977 expelled IBM from India, along with Coca-Cola and various other companies. Fernandes recalled proudly: “IBM was very cocky. They went to the extent of telling me that they have refused to accept what the French president, General Charles de Gaulle, had told them [to dilute their equity]. So I told them, ‘If you think the General succumbed to you, I am telling you that I am not succumbing to you. You get out.’ Yes I said, ‘You get out.’ … I am anyway against computers.”15

  With Indian clerks now busily programming the monstrous machines all over the world, what did K. Anirudhan think about the electronic menace? He told me on the telephone from his home in Kerala that although he remained an active communist, he believed computers and automation were essential: “We have adapted. We want to be competitive. Personally I don’t use a computer, but my son studied business and technology at the IIT in Bombay.” This was not an unfamiliar story, the politician whose children did things he would not have wanted others to do (another son was, unsurprisingly, a Member of Parliament). I had noticed many people from Kerala in Bangalore, working in new-technology companies and call centres; in some cases it was their only way to secure a job without moving to the Gulf.

  The IITs or Indian Institutes of Technology were themselves a product of Nehru’s forward planning. Just before independence, the British Indian government had moved to establish higher technical institutions of an equivalent standard to Manchester or MIT. Nehru took this path-breaking idea and developed it, bringing in lecturers from around the world to the new IITs. Before independence, India had good scientific research centres, but engineering colleges were focused on producing engineers for civil projects like railways and bridges. Now, world-class establishments had been set up; the difficulty, which grew steadily worse, was that the graduates had too little to do. In 1970 an Indian businessman and classical singer, Vinay Bharat Ram, secured permission from Sony to assemble electronic calculators in India. It was a coup—but the Indian government blocked the plan. Ram was not deterred. He reverse-engineered a desktop electronic calculator and, unable to import a suitable plastic casing for it, housed it in a wooden cabinet the size of a briefcase. The calculator went into production and sold well.16 During Indira Gandhi’s last years in office, realizing the system was failing, and influenced by her son Rajiv’s enthuasiasm, she lifted some of the restrictions on electronics.

  By the 1980s, Indians around the world were showing an aptitude for the growing computer industry, and companies in India such as Wipro, TCS and Satyam were being developed which would soon be at the front of the software boom. Nandan Nilekani described the bizarre obstacles facing his company Infosys—which today has revenues of over $4bn—in its early days. When it wanted to import a 150 MB hard disk drive, it took so long to get permission from the government that the manufacturer had improved the capacity to 300 MB by the time it came through. “This meant changing the import licence—and that took another six to eight months, luckily coming through before the drive was upgraded again.”17 Like other fledgling software companies at the time, Infosys was founded by Indians from middle-class families who had no access to capital or to established business houses. The way they operated was hardly noticed at first, tying up with foreign companies like Reebok and building a Silicon Valley-style campus in Bangalore on land supplied cheaply by the state government.18 Bangalore was home to an extraordinary concatenation of industries, which would help not only with the launch of India’s IT industry, but with the continuing supply of highly trained engineers. It had long been a “science city” containing public sector enterprises, private companies and academic institutions which specialized in electronics, aeronautics, artificial intelligence, radar development, defence avionics, robotics, bio-engineering and space research.19

  It was only in the 1990s, when large foreign banks and other industries started to outsource their back-office operations to India, that it became clear something of great social and economic significance was happening. Business visitors from overseas started to speak about India in ways that would have been hard to envisage a couple of decades earlier. Jack Welch of General Electric proselytized about the virtues of Bangalore to audiences in the United States, struck by the “terrific scientific, engineering and administrative talent” and the “enormous number of people with great technical skills.”20 An Indian physicist, who had recently come back from a conference in Texas, described the shift to me: “I have been going to events such as this for years. In the past, when I said I was Indian, people did not react. Now it’s like: ‘Oh, you’re from India? You must be the smartest guy in the room.’ ”21

  Mack lives in California. When the sun rises over the Golden Gate, he throws on a pair of Levi’s and an Old Navy top, or maybe a T-shirt from the pile of free ones he has with “Yahoo!” or a geeky conference logo on the front. Silicon Valley was once filled with fruit orchards but is now famous as the home of innumerable tech companies; compared to many parts of the U.S. it is wealthy, ethnically diverse and liberal. Mack grabs some bites of breakfast, scoops up his iPhone and the keys to his Acura TL and says goodbye to his wife and son at the door of their three-bedroom apartment. On the way to work, he drops his daughter at her school in Santa Clara and has a fifteen-minute drive past shopping malls, banks and software companies until he reaches the Yahoo! headquarters at Sunnyvale.

  While his system starts up, he heads for the pantry to wash his teacup and fill his water bottle. What he does at the moment he sits down at his work station is significant—will he check email, log on to Facebook, update his status, Twitter?—because Mack’s job is to catch us at this precise instant in our day. He oversees the Yahoo! front door, the homepage, and with 300 million people visiting daily, he has to understand our “check-in” behaviour better than we do. What is to stop us from spending a few minutes on the site answering email, and then wandering off elsewhere? Mack has a team of ten working with him, people from China, India, Korea—even some from the United States. He specializes in ideation, in coming up with the ideas that will make Yahoo!’s website more attractive than its competitors.

  Come lunchtime, he heads for the cafeteria to have salad or world food; Italian, Lebanese, Japanese, whatever they are serving that day. He returns to his work station, but he has been working all the while on his iPhone. “Wife and mother-in-law go Vegas, in charge of kids for next two days,” he tweets. So far, so American; but Mack comes from Bangalore.

  He was born in 1975 to what he calls a middle-class family. In those days, middle-class Indian families had few consumer goods, no holidays and no slack. Every rupee counted, but it did not feel like deprivation because everybody else had little too. “Things were pretty different at that time,” Mack said. “We didn’t have big plans. I took a degree at Bangalore University in fine arts, photography and advertising. I wasn’t very good at studies compared to the others. I enjoyed painting and photography, and I was influenced by Kannada literature and the Russians—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy—and artists like Picasso and Gauguin.” His family was unusual: the emphasis was more on creativit
y than on hard study, and his father was the devoted editor of a little bi-monthly magazine in Kannada. “We would have discussions about poetry, politics, literature, art. My father used to ask us to read out things from the newspapers, very loud. We had a noticeboard where I would put paintings. But if you talk to other people like me, you’ll find they spent most of their evenings at engineering coaching classes.

  “In 1996 I did an interview with a company. My mother said I should do computers. The offer of being able to use a PC was important, as there was no way we could have afforded one at home. I took the job because it gave me the chance to scan images—I wanted to be an illustrator. Within a year, I was in front of a computer 24/7. I was fascinated by the software. I started using everything, Adobe Photoshop, 3D Studio Max. All the software was freely available in India as it was pirated, and I could begin practising on it in a way that people in the U.S. couldn’t at the time. Without pirated software you would never, ever have had so many geeks from India.

  “In 2000 I moved away from software towards web development and began working for a U.S. company in Bangalore. They gave me the opportunity to move to San Jose [in California] and I was put in charge of some areas of their user interface. It was my first time abroad. I had to adapt to new ways of living. I was feeling insecure. Although my parents are veg, I was not, but I felt a bit of guilt about eating beef. We went to a hamburger joint and I ate some almost by accident. When I told my father, he asked whether I had enjoyed it and when I said yes, his answer was, ‘Well that’s OK, but don’t tell your mother.’ Then I started tasting other meats too.

  “The way a U.S. company worked was very different, and surprising to me. They said, ‘OK, see what you can make,’ and offered me stock options, which wouldn’t have happened in an Indian company. My English was not that polished. It was hard to converse. Kannada was my first language, the language I used at home. Other young programmers and designers from India, Brazil, Pakistan, Israel felt the same way, but we knew people were not looking at our English, but at what we could do. So some things were pardoned. My role was very critical for the company. I was trying to tame the engineering problems with the interface—and everyone uses the interface! It was hard to communicate to the Americans why I was taking a decision. I had to draw ideas on a whiteboard to explain exactly why. In the end I stopped doing that and learned the correct terms for things I knew instinctively, web-world phrases they would understand like ‘heuristic evaluation’ and ‘user-centred design.’