Month: May 2010

When India became politically independent in 1947, it started off with major handicaps such as high poverty, low literacy, inadequate infrastructure, and indifferent leadership. But India also had the necessary ingredients for overcoming those: adequate natural resource base, the goodwill of foreign nations (consequently aid from them for development), large labour force, a large number of sufficiently educated citizens to create the hard and soft infrastructure, etc.

But even after 63 years, India is in many senses worse off than it was in 1947. We have to understand the whys and hows of India’s failure to develop. That’s the unavoidable first step to putting India on a path to recovery. We cannot fix problems that we don’t understand the causes of, or worse yet, if we don’t even admit that we have problems.

Here are a few questions we have to answer to get an understanding of what went wrong and why.

• Why is India still poor?
• Why have the numbers of Indians below the poverty line doubled to more than 500 million since 1947?
• Why doesn’t India have a decent education system?
• Why are 70 percent of Indians still stuck in tiny villages in the 21^st century?
• Why is 60 percent of the labor force involved in agriculture?
• Why is India’s industrial base so small?
• Why doesn’t India generate sufficient electrical power?
• Why doesn’t India have a modern rail network?
• Why doesn’t India have a serviceable road network?
• Why is India so unfriendly to business and entrepreneurship?

The search for these answers is the start for the path to reclaim India. Our so-called leaders have failed us. It is up to us now to change the course of our nation.

Continued tomorrow.

A year ago in May, Indians gave a definitive verdict  to the Congress delivering it more seats than any single party had got in a long time. The hope was that we would finally have a government that works. The 100-day agenda outlined by the new government offered promise.

That was all a year ago.

What a difference a year makes.

Last Friday night, I opted to watch some of the news channels instead of India getting clobbered by Australia in the T20 match. Headlines Today was playing the Raja-Radia tapes and focusing on the umpteenth expose of the spectrum scandal. That Raja continues to be our telecom minister is a telling tale on the state of affairs of the nation. That Our ‘Honourable’ Prime Minister continues to let him continue to be in the cabinet is an even sorrier story. But the sorriest part is how we – the educated Indians – have become immune to corruption and the misdeeds of the politicians.  The casualty, as we stumble from one crisis to another scam, is governance and much-needed development of the country

I will, in the coming days, discuss my frustrations with what I see happening around us. I have my biases – having helped co-found the Friends of BJP last year, and working through this year to revive the movement. For a moment, leave the political affiliation aside. Focus on the future of the country and our children. We are watching what is happening. If 10-15 years from now, your then grown-up child were to ask you, “You saw what was happening. Why didn’t you do something about it?” What will be your answer? That answer – and the action we take (or choose not to take) now – will determine the fate of this country.

Continued tomorrow.

I wrote this almost exactly a year ago:

There is a significant apathy that is there in urban India. It is a combination of the quality of candidates, the disenchantment with all political parties and a general distaste with all things political. There is a feeling that one’s vote will make absolutely no difference. This apathy is complemented by the cumbersome voter registration process. There are many I know who won’t be able to vote because their name is not on the electoral rolls.

Even while there needs to be a simplification of the voter registration process, we in urban India need to get past our apathy and start engaging with the political process. That is a small and necessary first step towards a multi-year effort reinventing India’s political process and governance. Participation, and not Abstention, is the Solution.

Middle India Frustration that leads to Apathy can also be converted into Action. That’s the opportunity to help change India’s political and policy future.

This week’s links:

• NYT’s Nisenholtz on the importance of Engagement: “News web sites have, so far, achieved limited success because, in part, the rules of engagement are so different online.”
• Very Personal Computing: edited by Jean-Louis Gassée. The center of financial gravity in the computing world—the Center of Money—has shifted. No longer directed at the PC, the money pump now gushes full blast at the smartphones market.
• The Internet is Cyclical: by MG Siegler. “The web is currently transitioning from open systems dominating to closed systems taking over. Nowhere is this more evident than with Apple’s App Store, and Facebook…I’m certain that one day in a few years (or maybe less), we’ll be back to the so-called “open” web again. It has happened before.”
• The Data-Driven Life: from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. “…Almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.”
• Economist Special Report on Television: “Television is adapting better to technological change than any other media business.”

I visited the Landmark store on its opening day. It is massive — about 42,000 sq ft, which includes books, toys, gaming, and more. I checked their Children’s section, and they had a very large collection. I hope this leads to more book sales and reading — in India, a book selling 10,000 copies is considered a bestseller. We need to be doing 10X that.

Phoenix Mills (or High Street Phoenix as it likes to be called) has morphed amazingly over the past 5-odd years. There now is plenty of parking also. And there is Shangri-La Hotel coming up in the next few months. It may not look that big from the outside, but the scale becomes apparent as you walk around inside. There is a store for every income level and every category within.

Here is some of the commentary on the Web:

Medianama:  “The acquisition has significant synergies for for Netcore, with Greynium’s online businesses complementing Netcore’s mobile business…The question some people are asking me: does OneIndia add ability to monetize to MyToday SMS? It does add significant content and newsgathering ability, alongwith classifieds as explained above: news updates via MyToday SMS would carry links to OneIndia’s mobile portals, and Click.in tags. It’s an interesting combination of an Internet, Mobile and Mobile Internet play, and adds inventory. But what of monetization, is the question?”

Afaqs:  “As the line between PC-Internet and mobile-Internet becomes blurry, the acquisition will help both the companies to reach out to their customers on both media. [NetCore CEO Abhijit] Saxena says, ‘As the functionalities converge, users are accessing the Internet and a whole lot of content and services – both audio and video – either on mobile or via the PC-Internet. There is a very thin line between these two streams and going forward, users will be swapping between the screens to access content. Through this acquisition, we want our clients to reach out to their audience irrespective of the platform.'”

WATBlog:  “This should be an interesting foray to follow. As earlier portals like Rediff had tried this by investing in a company like Vakow which later didn’t work out. It also probably points towards the fact that an only mobile play and monetization is finding it tough to grow and scale on its own and may require web integration to attract advertisers with a full suite of digital solutions.”

Pluggd.in: Interview with BG Mahesh, CEO of Greynium:  “Local languages have grown tremendously in our country. The local flavour is important. When foreign media came to India they had to adopt to Hindi and now if a national media has to go local then it has to adopt regional language. Content is the only reason why any medium will be successful and we have complete faith that it is content only which will drive the success of web and mobile.”

VCCircle: “Following this buy, NetCore plans to create solutions that can be accessed simultaneously from mobile and internet. The company is also interested for acquisitions in the direct-to-consumer and direct-to-enterprises services space. “

Combine to reach consumers across PC Web, SMS and Mobile Internet in multiple Indian Languages

NetCore Solutions Pvt Ltd has acquired Greynium Information Technologies Pvt Ltd. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. NetCore’s founder and Managing Director, Rajesh Jain, had earlier invested in Greynium through his personal venture capital fund, Emergic Venture Capital.

Greynium is a market leader in the Indian languages Internet portals space (under the “OneIndia.in” – http://oneindia.in – brand), and also has a growing position in the online Indian classifieds space (with its Click.in – http://click.in – portal).  NetCore is one of India’s largest digital communications companies, with its email and SMS solutions being used by over 2,000 companies.

Said Abhijit Saxena, CEO of NetCore Solutions: “Given that local languages are crucial for India, this strategic acquisition will position NetCore well going ahead in building both reach (across Internet and mobile) and revenue (from ads, lead generation, content subscriptions and commerce). Netcore through MyToday has been focused on driving a direct-to-consumer business and this conforms to that objective. Building a large digital consumer base across web, SMS and the mobile Internet will allow NetCore  to monetise this base effectively not only across both media as also create opportunities around e-commerce and m-commerce.”

BG Mahesh, founder and CEO of Greynium said, “Greynium has been an early pioneer in the local languages space in India. It has a large Internet reach (6+ million monthly unique visitors, on its portals in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam). This complements the 4 million mobile (SMS) reach that Netcore has through MyToday. Greynium’s presence with its senior leadership team in Bangalore will also strengthen the Southern regional office for NetCore.”

Said Rajesh Jain, founder and Managing Director of NetCore Solutions: “In India, there is no company which has successfully managed to create a large presence in the consumer space on the Internet and mobile. The future of the Internet in India will be a multi-screen one, defined by services that span the mobile-PC continuum.  The combination of MyToday’s mobile services and OneIndia’s Internet portals creates new opportunities for both consumers and enterprises.”

My US stay that began in September 1988 ended with my return to India in May 1992. I had quit NYNEX six months ago and spent that period in California working at a company as a precursor to coming back (with a friend) in a possible JV.

My return journey took me via Singapore. That was the most convenient way to come to Mumbai from San Francisco. The transit time in Singapore was  about 12 hours. I went to meet a person who ran a big trading business out of Singapore. I still remember meeting him at his office and seeing the huge Singapore port in the window from his office. He talked about Singapore and all that it had accomplished. I was riveted with his success story — after all, I was en route to India to become an entrepreneur.

When I landed in Mumbai, I had a distressing experience. The Customs officers would not pass my PC  which I had got on Transfer of Residence. They arbitrarily assessed it at a high value, and wanted money to clear it. The odds were stacked against me given the discretionary powers vested in the officers.

I spent the next 6 hours (my first 6 hours back in India) at the airport going from one counter to another — I was determined that I would not pay them anything that was not official. My mother waited patiently outside. It took inordinately long to get the paperwork done – and I left the airport in the wee hours of the morning without the PC. For that, I had to come back the next day to meet some Assessment Officer, and pay money (by cheque) before I could get the PC out.

The contrast between Singapore and India that encompassed a single day could not have been more stark. And even today, as I look back 18 years ago, even though things have improved in India, I cannot but help think of our lost decades that stunted a generation. Even today, we are still not able to outgrow the wrong turns we took post-Independence.

Come May, and a memory that comes by is of a day almost exactly 18 years ago when I returned for good from the US to become an entrepreneur in India. And with that is the memory of the day I first landed in the US in September 1988. Let me start with the latter.

I landed in New York on an afternoon on the Labour Day weekend in 1988 just ahead of the orientation week at Columbia University. A friend was supposed to come and pick me up, but didn’t. This was in the pre-cellphone era, so I had no way to trace him. I had made a booking at YMCA, so went there by cab. The Lufthansa flight had left me very tired and with an upset stomach.

I reached YMCA and promptly fell asleep. The jet lag was taking its toll. I was feeling feverish, and was very hungry but didn’t want to go out on my own for some reason. My friend finally came in the evening, and that was a big relief. My first meal in the US was at Pizza Hut! It was my first taste of pizza. Post-dinner, I went off with my friend to stay at his graduate housing at Columbia – my housing request hadn’t yet come through.

For some reason, the memory of that day has stayed on. It wasn’t a particularly enthralling day.  But it was the first day in the land that was so different from India, and a start of a fascinating four-year journey.

A small but somewhat profound post from a year ago:

I was in Lucknow for a Friends of BJP event. As we were on our way from the airport for the event, a friend remarked: “There are not two but three Indias.”

The first India is is in which many of us live in — very urbanised metros and cities like Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad. The third India is rural India (or Bharat as some call it). The second India in between consists of dozens of smaller cities and towns like Lucknow. It is an India that is not easy for us to relate to. More than just the nature of the city, it is also the mindset which differentiates people from the first and second India. Our challenge is not just to modernise the cities, but also the thinking.