Month: November 2009

Ten years ago, on November 29 1999,  I sold my previous company, IndiaWorld, to Satyam Infoway. It was a defining moment for me. It was also not an easy decision to make.

Six weeks before the sale actually happened, I was wondering how I would manage to raise venture capital for the business, given that many competitors were doing so. A deal for an investment had just fallen through.

Then, it all suddenly changed. I had not one but two extremely attractive offers to buy IndiaWorld. And in the space of just over a month, the deal with Satyam Infoway materialised. That’s how life is sometimes!

I had not built IndiaWorld to sell it one day. In fact, I ran the business as if I expected to run it for the rest of life. But there are times when one has to think not just from the heart, but also from the head.

Tomorrow: The Announcement

I wrote this on December 1 last year:

There is a palpable sense of outrage and fear in people – outrage because of the failure of the politicians and bureaucrats to prevent such attacks, and fear because there is no guarantee that this will not happen again somewhere else in India in the next few months (or weeks). There is also a tremendous sense of Pride at the armed forces – whom we saw in live action through the days. Put it all together, and these mixed feelings create a restlessness within. That’s why it is not like previous times. This time, it is different. And if out of this, we finally get a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, then those 195 deaths will not have been in vain.

How wrong I was. A year on, how little things have changed. The same state government, the same Home Minister in that government. The CM then was put in the Union Cabinet. The Union Home Minister then is probably going to be a Governor soon.

This week’s links:

• Mobile Data Apocalypse: by Michael Mace. “In the last year or so, the attitude has shifted dramatically from “no one is using mobile data” to “oh my God, there’s so much demand for mobile data that it’ll destroy the network.”
• Best Business Books of 2009: by strategy+business.
• 10 UI Design Patterns: from Smashing Magazine (June). A bit old, but very good and relevant. “Design patterns are solutions to recurring problems. By extension, UI design patterns are solutions to common user interface problems. This article goes over 10 interesting UI design patterns that you can use in your own projects.”
• The World in 2010: from The Economist. Always a great read.
• The Other Education: by David Brooks (New York Times). “We pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.”

I dream of an India that has rid itself of corruption at the highest levels of its government. (If we start at the top, the clean waters will flow down quickly to the lower levels.) I dream of an India where people in government make decisions that are right for the country, and not for themselves or their benefactors.

I dream of an India that has the money to invest in all the things we should have but never had any leftover money for – education, healthcare, infrastructure, transportation, energy, and more.

I dream that this can happen in my lifetime.

It will probably require a miracle for something like this to happen. But if we stop waiting for this miracle, perhaps we can work together to make that future happen. I don’t know how. What I do know is that right now a Few are holding Many to ransom. They have done it for 60 years, and unless we do something different, they will do it for 60 more. We can sit back and let that happen, or let our blood boil enough that we will want to do something about it.

India needs a Second War for Independence. This time, we need to fight some of our own.

India needs to be made free of corruption before it can become developed. But  the entire existing Indian governance ecosystem will prevent this from happening.

Seen from the outside, it is quite clear that no honest business person will ever make it the top and be able to clean up the system. There are too many vested interests for that to happen.

The change has to come from within the political system. Someone needs to rise and be supported by the masses. That person has to make only one promise – to ensure a clean government – and all the development that should have happened in six decades but did not will happen in five years. That’s how much money is there in the system.

It is not going to be easy because the other politicians, whose livelihood depends on their being in power, will not allow such a person to rise to the top. This is where we need to come in. We, the People, need to say enough is enough. And we need some among us to help drive this change. Are we there yet? No way. Because we have learnt to somehow manage to survive in this corrupt system.

 Continued tomorrow.

Once in a while, the government of the day will send out the CBI to raid a few people here and there, to show how they care about creating a corruption-free country. A few days later, the case is slowed down, and vanishes from the headlines.

This happens because the chain of corruption goes to the highest levels of our governments (centre and state). Of course, it can never be proven in a court of law. But we all know how it works. Ministers are at the apex of a system that includes bureaucrats, businessmen and others. Anyone wanting that little ‘extra special’ gets it by paying someone off. The percentages in the incentive system for distributing money are quite clear to all.

In all this, India suffers. We are poor not because we lack resources or wealth. We are poor because we are corrupt. And it is in the interest of those in power to keep us poor. For a politician, no amount of money is ever enough.

India needs a person who can clean up the system. And it has to start at the top. India needs someone like Lee Kuan Yew, the man who led Singapore’s development. Singapore became a first world country within a generation, and it is also consistently among the top three least corrupt countries in the world. Those two facts are causally related.

Eradicating corruption at the highest levels will create a major difference in India. Firstly, more money will be available for spending. All public funds allocated for support and development will actually go towards those ends instead of it being siphoned away. Secondly, the spending priorities will be determined more rationally instead of being based on which scheme gives the most opportunity the corruption or for buying the loyalty of vote banks. Taken together, removing corruption from the highest levels of governance is the biggest game-changer for India. Nothing else can match the multiplicative benefits the country receives from eradicating corruption.

 Continued tomorrow.

When you talk to people in the know, all kinds of stories about politicians come out. So, I cannot believe that these stories are totally unknown. Of course, the smart ones cover their tracks well through front companies and people. Much of the wealth is held in the form of land banks. As someone put it the other day, almost every politician worth his name in Maharashtra has one or more of the following three: sugar mill / co-operative bank, college, power plant. The big daddies in the state would easily make it to the top of the Forbes Richest Indians list.

Many times the corruption is quite blatant. The telecom sector has been sucked dry by various Ministers over successive decades right in front of our eyes, and we haven’t done anything about it. Look at what happened with the new operators who were literally handpicked for additional 2G licences. What happened after the election? The same person got the same ATM (Anytime Money) ministry even after it had become clear that his actions cost the country tens of thousands of crores.

In Maharashtra, it took a couple weeks to form a ministry because of the wrangling for ministerial posts. The worth of a Minister is linked to the money that his ministry has control over. There was no discussion on a vision for the future, just a battle to control the spending – and therefore the siphoning.

I am not saying anything new. We all know this. We just turn a blind eye to it all.

Continued tomorrow.

A recent issue of Outlook had a cover story on Koda, the former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, who is alleged to have looted Rs 4,000 crore from the state. A related article in the magazine was on all the scams that have taken place in India and how little we seem to care about all those stories on corruption.

The Reddy brothers, YSR’s family, Koda, Raja – these are just the latest additions. They are the tip of the iceberg. For the record, all of them get away with the loot, and continue to be in positions of influence. Indeed, I cannot think of a single politician who has put behind bars for corruption.

This is a cancer that is not restricted to any particular political party. It infects the whole system. An honest politician has become an oxymoron.

Politics has become a way – and perhaps the only way in India today – to amass unimaginable wealth in the shortest possible of time. Of course, entry to the club is becoming increasingly difficult because politicians have realised that getting one or more of their offsprings into politics is the surest way of ensuring the ill-gotten wealth stays. The façade of ‘youth’ is being used to legitimise power and money procured by dubious means.

We, the voters of the country, are as much to blame. We don’t demand accountability. We keep voting back to power the same folks who keep ripping us off. And in all this, we stay a poor country – waiting forever for the date with destiny.

Continued tomorrow.

Continuing from last week’s Blog Past on the Rs 5,000 PC ecosystem, here is a link to a Newsweek cover story from February 2007 on Novatium’s $100 PC. (Novatium is a company I helped co-found.)

Despite the country’s rise as an outsourcing hub, PCs are selling slowly–far more slowly than mobile phones or motorbikes–because they are too expensive, too complicated to use and too difficult to maintain. What people have been waiting for, some experts think, is a new approach to computing that boils the essence of Internet access down to its lowest cost–and lowest risk. Jain plans to offer all this in lease deals that include easy-to-use hardware, Internet connection, application software and service–for $10 a month.

This formula could provide a long-sought bridge over the digital divide–and may just change the way the average person thinks of computing. The solution would open up a huge new market for Internet service providers, starting in India but possibly spreading to other emerging markets, a possibility that is already attracting the attention of the world’s biggest computer companies. It would become a target for innovation on a global scale, forged by immense competition for new customers, and that would have a big impact on the PC world in the West.

This week’s links:

• The Future Of The Web: Where Will We Be In Five Years?: by Cameron Chapman (via Atanu). 15 predictions about the future.
• 10 Top Consumer Mobile Applications by 2012: from Gartner. Top 3 are money transfer, LBS and search.
• 2009’s top 10 Emerging Enterprise Technologies: from InfoWorld.
• The Death of the URL: by Chris Messina.
• The War for the Web: by Tim O’Reilly. “We’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.”