Computerization in Nilekani's Imagining India

Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation promises to occupy a central position in discussions about India as well as the world economy this year. The book was released last year in India, came out in the United States just this past March, and has racked up some prominent reviews recently. Particularly relevant to this blog are the book's observations on computers' role in the economy and society.

Author Nandan Nilekani can speak with quite a bit of authority on computers, having founded and led Infosys, an early success story in modern Indian commerce and a major player in the historic rise of outsourcing.

Imagining India is a huge book with many big agendas; it covers education, infrastructure, environmental challenges, government intervention, and the role of historical narrative, among other things. Biggest among its agenda--and the one that I wager will generate the most debate--is Nilekani's own version of a modern combination of neoliberalism and neoprogressivism that seems to be gaining ground. The general idea is that governments should take a leading role to promote social progress by creating an infrastructure that allows individuals to form their own destinies (good education, good health care, good physical infrastructure, a light-touch form of regulation that ensures quality, and occasional direct welfare payments) rather than preserving oases of protection and easily abused subsidies for particular interest groups, notably unions, small businesses, and disadvantaged castes.

But all that lies beyond the scope of the Radar blog and of my own powers of analysis. I'll just comment on the following points from the book, because they concern the role of computers and because they resonate with trends I see in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Technophobia shouldn't be assumed
• Internet access goes along with transparency and egalitarianism
• Software leads innovation in other areas

A lot of technologists glibly anticipate that computers and Internet access will be rejected by some group of people who are implicitly labeled ignorant or clueless: racial minorities, poor people, the elderly ("how can you get my grandmother to use this?"), etc. In every case, the key to adoption turns out to be access and sometimes the availability of useful applications. When presented with the opportunity, these populations always prove eager to take advantage.

Nilekani cites one instance after another of rural village dwellers, farmers, taxpayers, and others who quickly grasp what computers and Internet access can do for them. Whether it's the chance to learn English, check crop prices, or pay a utility bill, Indians at all levels come to depend on the computer once it's introduced. (The hard thing, as you might guess, is persuading agencies and local officials to install systems that undercut their power as gatekeepers.) And we've all heard of the Hole in the Wall Project, where Indian kids in slums come to enjoy and figure out how to use computers with little or no adult help.

Nilekani may be citing anecdotes selectively, but his observations echo other reports I've heard about disadvantaged or lagging communities. The problem is not the people, but other factors such as availability, cost, and usefulness.

Internet access goes along with transparency and egalitarianism

One reason the Indian population loves computers, according to Nilekani, is that it attacks favoritism and outright corruption. This advantage matches up with the promise of open government in the United States and other developed countries.

In some cases, Indians are burdened by extremely crude forms of corruption that crumble the instant computers are installed. One example in the book is the registration of changes in land records, which farmers are required to report to the government every year. Agency staff could easily steal land by deliberately filing wrong reports, or extract bribes by delaying the filing until the desperate farmer caves in. But a computerized system takes the staff person out of the process.

Bringing sunlight into government activities in most developed countries has somewhat subtler effects and becomes a more long-term project, but the essence is the same and depends on computerization to work. In the US, we have a lot more control over the stimulus package, thanks to Recovery.gov, than we have over expenditures in Iraq or the bail-out to the finance industry. Indians are similarly learning how to watch over their governments and raise their voices digitally, according to Nilekani.

The sunny role that people around the world are granting to the technologies of going online is not intrinsic to these technologies, because they also lie at the center of modern surveillance, warfare, and regimentation. The benign role is hard won, and represents a collective choice by the public that has adopted the technologies. As Nilekani puts it:

The idea of technology as something ominous and scary that is used by "Big Brother" to control our lives and eliminate jobs has given way to the idea that it empowers, liberates and gives us access to all the services that are due to us, as citizens and consumers.

The reason that the computer industry was the first to take off in 1990s India is that it required practically no infrastructure. Of course, it required a computer, which might require six to twelve months for an import license in those days. It also required electricity, which could be obtained in major cities and supplemented by private generators. (In areas of unauthorized urban growth, the slumlords strung the wires.) So in a regulatory environment that scrutinized and imposed conditions on every allocation of equipment, it was much easier for entrepreneurs to set up a computer firm than any business that had more physical manifestations.

As is well known, the relative independence of computing from physical infrastructure also made Indian companies lucrative in a world increasingly linked by the Internet. Nilekani says that this physical flexibility was also valuable internally, helping IT-savvy businesses cut across the logistical and political barriers that have always geographically segmented the Indian market.

Nilekani seems to believe that there's nothing about the computer industry that's uniquely suited to Indian talents and business acumen. Now that the computer industry set an example, the same advantages have been applied to many other industries. In the 1980s, economists doubted that India could succeed in any industry, and a few years ago they wondered whether India could succeed in any industry except computer services. The evidence is now strong that the country will become a leader in many areas.

Indian industry is just one example where computerization has shown light on a path that social change can take. A worldwide example is provided by the open source movement, which Nilekani mentions only in the most fleeting manner in his conclusion--unfortunately enough, because free software can be a compelling wild card in story of international development, especially as part of a trend I dubbed tech-splicing in another article.

The first open license was a software license (the GNU General Public License). When it was released, the phenomena of allowing unlimited changes and sharing these changes looked like a peculiar aspect of software. But many years later, these ideas seeped out into fields of innovation with a more physical basis, and research by Eric von Hippel showed they always had legs.

Software was also the inspiration for gene splicing and other aspects of synthetic biology, even to the extent that biologists share their innovations in repositories that look like software libraries (check out the BioBricks Foundation).

Finally, the popularity of scripting and other software hacking initiated--or revived, or perhaps just legitimized--a tradition of solving a problem through invention instead of settling for a standardized, commercial solution. The DIY movement found in many areas of the world--including the Indian practice of assembling local motor vehicles called jugaad--makes it more and more likely that products of many types will come out of small, even amateur workshops.

Products of creativity and pure thought embody a freedom that allows them to metamorphose and spread quickly. The added formality and clarity that software brings to these activities doubles the power of that freedom. So my guess is that software will often lead the way in social innovations by a decade or more.