India, with a can-do spirit

Our overall S&T budget in 2002-03 was less than $ 3 billion. Pfizer’s R&D budget was over $ 5 billion. For a national budget that was smaller than the budget of a single company, India has achieved so much.

Take our space programme. Its R&D budget was $ 450 million last year. The R&D budget for General Motors was around $ 7 billion. What has our space programme achieved? Today, we design, develop, test and fabricate our own satellite launches. We have moved from one sophisticated launching vehicle to another, from ASLV to PSLV to GSLV.

We have launched 35 satellites, 14 geo-stationary. Not only do we launch our own satellites but also those of countries such as Germany and South Korea. And all this for a budget just seven per cent that of a single company in the United States..

I remember being part of a committee that reviewed scientific facilities in South Africa in 1997. Visiting a satellite tracking centre outside Pretoria, I asked, ‘‘Tell me, which is the best satellite image you get?’’ They showed me the imagery they claimed had the finest resolution. Those pictures were taken from the satellite IRS-1C. I am proud to say the I in IRS-1C stood for India.

Move beyond S&T and come back to the theme that India does so much for so little. Only 50 per cent of our children go to school, only 30 per cent of those go to the 10th standard, and only 40 per cent of that final figure pass. That makes it six per cent of all children, as against, say, South Korea’s 70 per cent.

At six per cent, we are talking of the tip of the iceberg. But what does that tip deliver? Last year, we exported $ 9.7 billion worth of software. Do you know how many contributed to this? Only 50,000 software engineers. That is 0.05 per cent of our population contributed to almost 10 per cent of our exports. The tip of the iceberg can deliver so much. What would happen if the entire iceberg were lifted?

Once again defeatism holds us back. Sheer statistics stare us in the face. In the primary school age-group, almost 80 million children are either not enrolled or are in schools but are not learning. This constitutes 50 per cent of our potentially school going children. Should we give up?

Pratham, a very innovative education initiative launched by the corporate world, believes this problem can be solved. That too by spending Rs 100 to educate one child per year. Beginning in the slums of Mumbai, Pratham has responded to this challenge by serving over a million primary school children across India.

We can deal with 80 million children, one may argue, but what about 200 million adults who cannot read and write? We reinforce our doubts by saying illiteracy is reducing at only 1.5 per cent per anum. We can then point to the constraints of trained teachers, and conventional methods of learning from the alphabet to words. These require 200 hours of instruction. The conclusion? We will need 20 years to attain 95 per cent literacy. But then there are some who are born optimists. They include the doyen f Indian IT, F.C Kohli. He has developed the computer-based functional literacy (CBFL) method. It focuses on the reading ability. It is based on the theories of cognition, language and communication.

In this method, the scripted graphic patterns and images are recognised through a combination of auditory and visual experiences by using computers. The method emphasises learning words rather than the alphabet. While the focus is on reading, it acts as a trigger for people to learn to write on their own.

Based on the CBFL method, Kohli’s team has developed innovative methodologies using IT and computers to build reading capability. This experiment was first conducted in Medak near Hyderabad. Without a trained teacher, the women learners started reading a newspaper in Telugu in eight to 10 weeks.

Kohli’s team developed these lessons to run on Intel 486s and earlier versions of Pentium PCs modified for multimedia.There are around 200 million such obsolete PCs in the world. By using them, the cost of making one person literate would be less than Rs 100. With CBFL, Kohli says he can increase literacy to 90-95 per cent in three to five years.

It is amazing how much human capital resides in the submerged part of the Indian iceberg. What do global giants like General Electric and Motorola have in common with a humble tiffin delivery network comprising 3,500 dabbawallas, who deliver 1.5 lakh lunch boxes in Mumbai each day?

The dabbawallas have the six sigma rating or efficiency rating of 99.999999, one error in one million transactions. This rating is that of Forbes.

Now, these are largely illiterate dabbawallas. Their secret lies in a coding system devised over the years. Each dabba is marked in indelible ink with an alphanumeric code of about 10 characters. The dabbawalla business model is a case study in management institutes.

We are a peculiar country. When challenged, denied a technology, we perform. Remember how India reacted to the denial of supercomputers in the 1980s? The Cray XMP-1205 was an American machine we needed for weather forecasting. It was not available for a variety of reasons.

But Indian scientists were challenged. They used massively parallel processing computing technology to create a supercomputer. Within three years and the $ 10 million C-DAC was given, the PARAM supercomputer was delivered.

I remember reading Washington Post at the time. ‘‘Angry India does it,’’ it said. If only we were permanently angry!

(The author is director-general, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. This is an edited version of his address at the 2003 Delhi University convocation)