Opinion Using tech,and brains,for growth

All these schools,plus 600 million cellphones,plus 1.2 billion people,half of whom are under 25,are India’s hope — because only by leveraging technology and brains can India deliver a truly better life for its masses. There are a million reasons why it won’t happen,but there is one big reason it might. The predicted really is happening: India’s young techies are moving from running the back rooms of Western companies,who outsourced work here,to inventing the front rooms of Indian companies,which are offering creative,low-cost solutions for India’s problems. The late C.K. Prahalad called it “Gandhian innovation,” and I encountered many examples around New Delhi.

Meet Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya,the CEO of Ekgaon. His focus is Indian farmers,“an emerging market within an emerging market.” Ekgaon built a software program that runs on the cheapest cellphones and offers illiterate farmers a voice or text advisory program that tells them when is the best time to plant their crops,how to mix their fertilisers and pesticides,and how much water to add each day. “Our farms are small,and advisers from the Agriculture Department can’t reach many of them,” he explains. “So they go for hearsay methods of planting,which leads to low productivity and soil desertification.”

Meet K. Chandrasekhar,the CEO of Forus Health,whose focus is “avoidable blindness” among the rural poor. A quarter of the world’s blind people,some 12 million,are in India,he explains,and more than 80 per cent of those are blind as a result of a lack of screening and a lack of ophthalmologists in rural areas. In the past,comprehensive screening required multiple expensive diagnostic devices. So Forus invented “a single,portable,intelligent,noninvasive,eye prescreening device” that can identify all five major ailments and can be run by a trained technician,who through telemedicine connects patients to a doctor. “We work with a Dutch company on optics,and the University of Texas supports us in business development,” Chandrasekhar adds. Outsourcees are becoming outsourcers.

Meet Aloke Bajpai,who cut his teeth working for Western tech companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something — he just didn’t know what. The result is iXiGO.com,which can run on the cheapest cellphones to help book the lowest-cost fares,whether for a farmer who wants to go by bus for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants fly to Paris. iXiGO now has one million unique users a month and is growing. Bajpai used free open-source software,Skype and Facebook marketing to build his platform and grow his company. They “enabled us to grow so much faster with no money,” he said.

Finally,there’s Nandan Nilekani,the former CEO of Infosys,who is now leading a government effort to give every Indian citizen an ID number — a crucial initiative in a country where most people have no driver’s license,passport or even birth certificate. In the last two years,100 million people have signed up. Once everyone has one,the government can deliver them services or subsidies — some $60 billion each year — directly through cellphones or bank accounts,without inept or corrupt bureaucrats siphoning some off. “We’re bringing the most sophisticated technology to the most deprived,” said Nilekani. “The hyperconnected world is giving us a chance to change India faster,at a larger scale,than ever before.”