Message From India
Reporting on new trends
in education technology

by J.G. Krishnayya


During the three quarters between April and December 1997, India's software exports totalled Rs. 4850 crores (about $1.1 billion), a growth of 70 percent over the same period in the previous year. It is expected to reach an annual rate of $5 billion by December 2000.

Despite these encouraging figures (or perhaps because of them), many observers have despaired over the quality of research and teaching at higher educational levels in India. This has been overshadowed by the huge numbers in education, the academic tradition in many communities, and the rigor of school and college teaching, which have resulted in Indian engineers and software professionals doing well both in India and abroad.

The success stories of Indian engineer-entrepreneurs in the U.S.(most recently the $300-million Hotmail sale to Microsoft) abound. And yet it is difficult to find a Ph.D. candidate in India. Not that there are not still a gaggle of good teachers. The last of the 1950s and 1960s foreign-returned Ph.D.s are still there, together with many keen younger men. But few students.

Jobs are so easily available, and the starting salaries for good B.E.s (graduates with a bachelor of engineering degree) so high (equivalent to the salary of an assistant professor, in the case of software engineers working in India, and many times that for those who get employed on overseas contracts), none of the graduates of top schools wants to go on for an Indian M.Tech (though they often accept assistantships abroad), let alone a Ph.D.

This was why the announcement by IBM last month that it was setting up a research center in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, was greeted with real excitement. The center would go from a size of 20 persons (at present) to 100 by year-end, and would be staffed "at the Ph.D. level" according to the news item. This follows closely on the announcement by Microsoft that it will have a software development facility operational in Hyderabad by late 1998. This will be the second such facility outside the U.S., and would in effect be a time-shifted extension of the Redmond, Washington labs, concentrating on the interoperability of Win-NT and BackOffice with non-Microsoft products. Initially it would have 25 staff, and growth would be organic.

These announcements, together with the success of many small indigenous software ventures started up by (Ph.D.) returnees from overseas, are making Ph.D. programs look more attractive. And just as environmentalists look at the numbers of tigers to gauge the success of their conservation programs, computer scientists in India view this new infusion of brainpower and corporate interest as a healthy indicator for the future of the computer science and informatics disciplines in India. Up until now, faculty positions in computer science have been going begging or have been filled by transferring people from other departments.

A new phenomenon has been noticed recently, however: Men in their 30s, with five to eight years' working experience in the U.S. following their Ph.D., are coming back to accept teaching jobs and Indian salaries. When asked, they say (a) they are in a top school (usually the Indian Institute of Technology or the Indian Institute of Science); (b) they can afford it because they have built up savings accounts during their time abroad; (c) they go back to work overseas in the summers and on sabbaticals; (d) they prefer to live and to bring up their children in India.

The number of overseas organizations setting up software development arms in India continues to grow. Computervision has 250 engineers in Pune, having scaled down its U.S. software facilities; Baan (the Netherlands maker of enterprise resource planning software) has just expanded its India presence fourfold and made its India site the major center for software development; Magic Enterprises (Israel) has just set up a joint venture in Pune with 48 engineers; Motorola has not only expanded its Bangalore center that provides worldwide support, but has also participated in two Masters-level telecommunications training centers in Bangalore (at the Indian Institute of Science) and Pune (at the Pune Institute of Computer Technology).

Meanwhile the National Institute of Information Technology (NIIT), India's largest private sector training-cum-software chain, which already has three centers in the U.S., has entered into an agreement with the Indonesian Yayasan Pendidikan Ilmo Pangatuhuan to launch NIIT's GlobalNet curriculum (Win-NT, Unix, Novell) in all the ASEAN countries, supported also by NIIT's NetVarsity. NIIT also has commenced operations in China. Working in collaboration with a major Hong Kong business house, and the government of Shanghai, they have opened their first 20 centers there, and expect to expand to 500 in the next five years. All the multimedia educational materials were translated in NIIT's 500-man Multimedia Center in New Delhi before being checked in China.

IIS Infotech, a $20 million global software export company specializing in Year 2000 solutions, is setting up a chain of Web sites in 10 different cities in the current year in preparation for providing a two-year Web and multimedia course followed by a one-year internship in industry.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a government company set up some years ago when the U.S. refused to export Cray supercomputers to India, has developed a six-month postgraduate course in multimedia and advanced computing. Earlier, the Centre developed some 100 Indian language fonts for the 20 major scripts in India and South East Asia, as well as add-on hardware for DOS, and word-processor and database management systems using their scripts.

Meanwhile education using computers or multimedia remains far behind the state of the art. Apart from NIIT, no other group is making major use of multimedia technology, although the number of new educational CD-ROMs has increased from 10 last year to about 50 this year. The advertising and film market is absorbing most of the qualified persons in this field. Prices of CD-ROMs also have to come down before they become a mass market item. Foreign-produced CD-ROMs sell for the U.S. retail price plus 75 percent, while indigenous CD-ROMs sell for the equivalent of between $25 and $50, which is perhaps twice to three times what a middle-class computerized family might be willing to pay.

Recently the Department of Electronics has floated a scheme for providing a franchised system of privately run multimedia centers all over the country, which could provide training as well as services. These are intended to operate on the service model of the existing "telephone booths" at every street corner from where one can make local, long distance or intercontinental telephone calls with computerized billing. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, which has developed the PARAM series of parallel supercomputers, is also involved in this effort. They will be responsible for developing the curriculum and package of materials for the multimedia centers under the Department of Electronics program.

J. G. Krishnayya is executive director of the Systems Research Institute in Pune, India. [email protected]


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