WASHINGTON, MAY 25: A winning combination of self-effacing candourand self-deprecating humour has marked Information TechnologyMinister Pramod Mahajan's weeklong swing through Digital America. Thevisit has served to enhance India's reputation as an info-tech powerand attract investments in social and infrastructure areas. In a score of meetings with Indian-American tech tycoons, Americancorporate czars, and US officials, Mahajan has displayed a keen earand quick wit in accomplishing a delicate mission, the implication ofwhich goes far beyond the flow of human or financial capital. The minister's subtle task involved not putting off people bypoompheting too much about India's sometimes overhyped softwareprowess, while at the same time leveraging the country's growingstrengths to bring in investments. He struck a fine balance. For instance, in his meeting with John Chambers, CEO of CiscoSystems, Mahajan spoke about the 200,000 IT professionals Indiaplanned on producing annually. He then won a promise that America'scurrently most celebrated executive would not only visit India thiswinter, but would also finance thousands of infotech schools inIndia. (Not that Chambers has no stake in it; Cisco's 23,000 workforce has3000 Indians,including five vice-presidents. The company cafeteria now has anIndian cuisine section.) Similarly, Mahajan went so far as to make the rather reckless promiseto the rain-fearing Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang that he would manipulatethe monsoons to enable him visit India. Scott McNealy, the CEO of SunMicrosystems, a company co-founded by the Indian mogul Vinod Khosla,was likewise wooed. In a meeting with journalists in Washington on Thursday, Mahajanbrought in a new dimension to India's foreign policy by suggestingthat some of the CEOs he met were actually more important thanleaders of countries. "With apologies to the Ministry of ExternalAffairs (MEA), I intend to have a mini-MEA in my ministry," he joked. He needn't have. The market cap of companies like Cisco and Microsofthas exceeded India's GDP. The value of Indian-owned companies in theUS alone is over $ 300 billion, some ten times India's foreignexchange reserves and enough to wipe the country's external debtthree times over. The minister said his mission in America was to tell the people thatIndia was not anymore a land of snake charmers but a country ofcomputer jocks. "There are as many dotcoms lining India's avenues asthere are cows on the roads," the quotable minister quipped. But as Mahajan himself conceded, President Clinton was doing a betterjob of projecting India as some kind of infotech utopia since histrip to the region. If anything, the minister suggested with a hintof modesty, India was a land where cows and mouse still co-exist.(Incidentally, among the meetings the minister had was one with GuyKawasaki, CEO of Garage.com and inventor of the computer mouse, amodern vehicle as venerated as Ganesha's carrier.) Such a sense of jovial moderation has won the minister appreciationfrom leading lights of the digital community. During his two-day stayin Silicon Valley, he met with some of the leading Indian transplantsand sought suggestions on how best to accelerate India's march intothe infotech age. Their general advice: improve infrastructure. The minister invited them to send their specific recommendations andpromised to act within a month of receiving it. A typical NRIrecommendation to the government on most info-tech issues consists ofjust two words: Butt Out. Government regulation, interference andmicromanagement is the biggest inhibitor to growth, they say. But in several meetings across the US, from New York to SanFrancisco, Mahajan won points by often trashing the system in India.A popular example: the minister recalled how he had to overnightprint 2000 copies of the bulky Subramanium Committee report to lay iton the table of the Parliament. The rules did not permit a CD-Rom tobe laid on the table of the House even though it would have beenquicker, easier, and made the most sense considering that all MPshave been given computers. Mahajan also put India's infotech stature in perspective,acknowledging that some of the statistics were embarrassing: anInternet penetration of less than 1 per cent and a telephone densityof less than 3 per cent. The "I Love You" bug did not affect India,he joked, because Indians were such great moralists that no oneopened the file. But in a more serious vein, Mahajan pointed out that TV and Cablepenetration was 33 per cent, and if TV sets were considered deliverysystems (like computers), then India had a digital density of 35 percent.
