India's Promise - Imagining the Future with Nandan Nilekani of Infosys
Monday, May 28, 2007DARREN GERSH: Information technology services is one of the most remarkable triumphs of Indian entrepreneurship, and the man who has done the most to promote India's promise in a wired world is Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys. From its campus in Bangalore, Infosys designs and delivers IT services to companies around the world. After building Infosys into a global competitor, Nilekani will step down as CEO in June. What do you see coming up for Infosys in the next five years? What services are you most excited about that Infosys might provide?
NANDAN NILEKANI, CEO, INFOSYS: It's really up to our ability to imagine what can be done that's limiting here, and it's important to imagine looking at the trends. It's to be able to say, the way technology is moving today, five years from now this will be so powerful or this will be so cheap or this will be so fast. And therefore, is there something that we can do five years from now using the power of this which we can't do today?
GERSH: You know, we used to be told, when people talked about offshoring, that the things that couldn't be offshored were face-to-face services. And then I visited a company here in India that's providing tutoring services to kids all over the world and in the United States face- to-face over the Internet. So which is it? Are we going to see face-to- face services, more face-to-face services, delivered from India?
NILEKANI: I think the term to use is -- I wouldn't say face-to-face; I would say things that require a physical presence. I mean, you can't have a haircut done remotely. And there's a lot of things which are just - - are not fungible, not really doable over a wire. But the act of tutoring is, I think can be done on a wire because it's ultimately about teaching and so forth. And the other thing which is happening is also because of the bandwidth going up and we are actually getting to a point where we can establish that kind of rapport and connection over the network. So things that earlier required close collaboration are now also becoming possible.
GERSH: So how big is the opportunity for a company like this going forward?
NILEKANI: It's big. I mean, today, we're talking about India has IT and BPO services, this whole category of knowledge services at about $30 billion. And the expectation is that it will double to $60 billion in the next, you know, three, four years. So that gives you a sense of the scale of the opportunity.
GERSH: Since I've been here, I've heard two things about India. On the one hand, I hear limitless pool of very talented, good people. On the other hand, I hear talent shortage, salaries going up, not enough people. Which is it?
NILEKANI: It's both. And I think it all depends on the prism through which you're looking at this because -- look at it in terms of graduates or people who have engineering skills. Clearly, the numbers have gone up and today we're talking about half a million engineering graduates. That's a pretty big number by any global standard. But then, there's the whole issue of how good is the quality? How relevant is the education they have got? Have they been exposed to the latest technology? Has the curriculum been appropriate to today's needs? And then you find that you have to dig into that.
GERSH: Some of the business leaders I've spoken with and the policy analysts who follow India say that they've seen India get ready to take off before, but it just doesn't move that fast. It gets to the runway, but then it doesn't take off, it doesn't move quickly. What do you see?
NILEKANI: That's true. But I think a variety of things have happened which has put India in the take-off mode. And that's fairly clear. I mean, whether the economy is growing, whether it's the rise of entrepreneurial companies, the free economy, the open society, which is now becoming more and more obvious, the English language skills, the demographic benefits. You know, there's a whole slew of things which indicate that this is for real, this is not a mirage.
Having said that, can we declare victory? Obviously not, because while you're able to get the growth, the growth is going to lead to income inequality. It's going to increase the stress between those who are successful and those who are not. So I think the way to look at it is, it's certainly taken off, but there's a lot more to be done to keep it in there.
