February 7, 2004

Two news items published in Dawn (Jan 14) intrigued its readers abroad. The first was about the federal information ministry’s resolve to set up 1,100 state-of-the-art computer labs, at the cost of Rs1.8 billion, at school and intermediate college levels in the coming three years.

According to this news report, Minister for Information Technology and Telecommunications Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari had said that under the project, 2,200 IT teachers and persons in charge of the labs would be provided to 1,100 schools and colleges for imparting education at the levels of class IX to XII.

The other story stated that the Higher Education Commission (HEC) had reviewed graduate and postgraduate curriculums of software engineering and had recommended a number of steps to develop the discipline. It added that the HEC has already revised and reviewed curriculums of a number of disciplines including natural sciences, basic sciences, computer science, information technology and MBBS/BDS being taught at graduate and postgraduate levels in the public sector universities and institutions of higher learning.

One wonders if the federal minister is aware of what is involved in creating 1,100 state-of-the-art computer laboratories and that where would he be able find 2,200 qualified IT teachers and lab supervisors.

As for HEC’s ambitious claim that it has, revised/reviewed computer science, information technology and MBBS/BDS being taught at graduate and postgraduate levels in the public sector universities and institutions of higher learning, one would like to know who were involved in this marathon work? What were their qualifications and experience? How much time did it take? And what was the need to review/ revise these curriculums.

One hopes that both the news items have a touch of reality and are not an exercise in rhetorics for record only or just to create a cosmetic affect.

The touch of reality comes from another news item which says the education ministry signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft’s “Partners in Learning Programme” for development of skills training in information and communication technology (ICT) for teachers and students in Pakistan.

In the context of these two news items, we would like describe two events which speak how other countries are faring in IT and how things are done to make a success.

Recently, we had the chance to visit the newly created California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, which are being called an investment in the future — the economic future of the region, and possibly of the US.

By investing tens of millions of dollars in this institute, the state of California, University of California and business leaders expect technology discoveries to produce billions of dollars in new economic activity in the area, increasing jobs and wealth.

They’ve chosen a director, Dr Smarr, with experience as director of a University of Illinois supercomputing research centre, Larry Smarr, who helped create the internet.

For his next act, Dr Smarr told us that he will focus on a wireless version. “It will be as critical to our society and our economy as the building of the highway system was to the last century,” Smarr said. “The internet is the infrastructure that will define the 21st century.”

The 261 researchers are trying out technology the public won’t see for three to 10 years, everything from the latest personal digital assistants, commonly referred to as PDAs, to sophisticated sensors that detect stress in drivers. They’re applying these new devices and technologies to a widevariety of problems, including speeding the cure for Alzheimer’s, building safer airbags and safeguarding the water supply.

The UC San Diego and UC Irvine Institute is one of four UC centres for science and innovation. The one at UCLA focuses on nanotechnology, while the center at UC San Francisco concentrates on biomedical research, and the center at UC Berkeley applies information technology to a variety of problems. Officials from Wall Street to the top echelon of academia will monitor the progress at the four UC centers.

So far the UCSD centre has collected $210 million in contributions and pledges, mostly from business community. All sponsored research projects will have what amount to prenuptial agreements that spell out and limit each sponsors rights. Under long-standing UC policy, the university and the researcher share patent rights for new products. Companies typically pay the university for licensing.

After building the national center for supercomputers at the University of Illinois and helping create the internet, Larry Smarr came to UCSD to resume the quiet life of an academic computer scientist. Instead, he has ended up leading a fast-moving institute with big ambitions to retain Southern California’s leadership position in telecommunications and information technology.

For the past year, Dr Smarr has served as the chief fund-raiser, visionary and diplomat at the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology. But don’t call him an administrator.

“I don’t run existing organizations — that’s part of my deal,” he said. Instead, Dr Smarr is a creator — a rare academic with the skills and desire to build new organizations from the ground up, who can stay motivated without the promise of the millions that entrepreneurs earn in the private sector.

Dr Smarr has also taken the institute global — signing exchange agreements with Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, France, Italy, Sweden and Germany.

The son of a Missouri florist, who still counts gardening among his favourite hobbies, Dr Smarr was trained as an astrophysicist. Along the way, he also became a computer scientist. In the early 1980s, as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Smarr helped persuade the National Science Foundation to fund a center for supercomputing applications.

At the time, supercomputers were located mainly at weapons labs. Dr Smarr wanted to use supercomputers to speed his research on astrophysics and black holes, but found he had to get security clearance and persuade scientists at the weapons labs to give him access to their powerful technology.

As director of the center for supercomputer applications, Dr Smarr worked on ways to open the technology to broad areas of research. The center helped form the backbone of the Internet. One student was Marc Andreessen, who developed the Netscape browser that revolutionized web access and turned Mr Andreessen into a tycoon.

As director of the supercomputing center, Dr Smarr gained experience as an “entrepreneur” but with a twist — he built the equivalent of a start-up within the university. He’s what management guru Peter Drucker calls an “intrepreneur.”

Now, as director of the institute, Dr Smarr spends hours sifting through proposals and connecting researchers in different disciplines.

“My job,” he said, “is to find these creative people and free them up so they can make the magic happen.”

The other event was a segment about Indian IT on CBS prime time TV show, 60 Minutes. Morley Safer, 60 Minutes correspondent, in his report says: “To many American employers, India is Nirvana. It has a stable democracy, an enormous English-speaking population, and a solid education system that each year churns out more than a million college graduates — all happy to work for a fraction of the salary of their American counterparts. And India epitomizes the new global economy — a country that often looks on the edge of collapse, a background of grinding poverty, visually a mess.

“And yet, whether you know it or not, when you call Delta Airlines, American Express, Sprint, Citibank, IBM or Hewlett Packard’s technical support number, chances are you’ll be talking to an Indian.

“We’re doing customer servicing there,” says Raman Roy, chairman of Wipro Spectramind, a leading outsourcing company. He helped start the Indian call center boom in the 90s when he came up with a business plan for American companies to direct their calls to India.

“Wipro had to build their own generators and their own satellite phone systems. The call centers are cool, self-sufficient islands in an uncertain sea of chaotic Indian street life. Inside, round-the-clock, they keep America on the line.

“The agents — as they’re called - are dutiful Indian sons and daughters. By night, they take on phone names such as Sean, Nancy, Ricardo and Celine so they can sound like the girl or boy next door.

“The real name is Tashar. And name I use is Terrance,” says one representative.

“My real name is Sangita. And my pseudo name is Julia,” says another representative. “Julia Roberts happened to be my favourite actress, so I just picked out Julia.”

“American movies are part of an agent’s training in how to sound all-American. Lavanya Prabhu is a call center trainer who guides young Indians through the labyrinth of American English. And she says she is able to pick up some of typical American accents while instructing her students.

“Well, you have Brooklyn. ‘You walk the walk and you talk the talk.’ And you have the southerner’s thing. ‘Oh hello, there. What can I do for you today,’” says Prabhu, who spends most of her time trying to de-Indianize her countrymen.

The call center employees earn $3,000 to $5,000 a year, in a nation where the per capita income is less than $500. The perks include free private transport to and from work plus the sheer heaven of an air-conditioned workplace.

“Absolutely. We’ve had globalization in the manufacturing sector with the auto industry, and Japan really emerging as a major auto power. We’ve had globalization in the low end manufacturing industry with China emerging as a global power,” says Iyengar. “But this is the first time in the knowledge industry we have globalization impacting two countries at such a large scale — India and the US.”

“The US government does not keep track of how many American jobs have gone overseas, but there are estimates that in just the last three years, as many as 400,000 jobs have gone to places like China, Russia, and India.

“There are some estimates that say that the whole outsourcing revolution, we can call it that, will really be one of the key factors in moving India towards developed economy status.”

“What would be the savings to a multi-national company? “You save anywhere between 30 to 50 percent,” says Wipro chairman Roy.

“And this is enough to dazzle even the most patriotic CEO, and so, JP Morgan Chase is hiring Indian stock analysts. Indians also answer some of the Amazon.com’s e-mail. And AOL and Dell send technical calls to India. Plus, if your doctor prescribes an MRI at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, it may be analyzed by a radiologist in India.

“So what’s left? Well, there’s taxes. Last year, only a thousand U.S. tax returns were prepared in India. This year, there were 25,000. “And next year, people are estimating that about 200,000 returns will be prepared in India,” says Dave Wyle, a 31-year-old American entrepreneur who expects to make a fortune on outsourcing for US accounting firms through his company, Sureprep, based in Bombay.

What makes India such a good candidate for outsourcing taxes specifically?

“The cost of the labour — it’s a fraction of the cost,” says Wyle. “You might be paying somebody $300 to $400 a month there that might make $3,000 to $4,000 a month or more in the United States.”

“Sureprep currently does work for more than 150 US accounting firms, and its client list grows larger each month. “These accounting firms range from small local firms to right now, it’s about 20 of the top 100 firms including one of the national firms,” says Wyle.

“Those American firms scan an individual’s tax documents into a computer. An Indian accountant logs on, fills out the return on his computer, and then it’s printed out in the US, checked, signed and sent to the IRS. But most people regard their tax returns as among the most private things they have. Is there any risk of that security being broken with tax returns flying through the ozone?

“The type of security you see in this facility is generally much more so than you would see in any US accounting firm.Everything is paperless,” says Wyle. “You’ll notice in the facility there’s no pens or papers on the desk. There’s no printers in the work room.

Everything’s done on screen.”

Young successful businessmen like Wyle and Roy no longer view the world as a place with boundaries. “This is a global economy,” says Wyle. “Geography is history. Distances don’t matter anymore,” adds Roy.

“But beyond the success and the money that’s being made in this business, there’s a terrific sense of national pride that India is making its mark in this very sophisticated way.

“There is a huge amount of nationalistic pride,” says Roy. “Because we want to show that as a work force, as a labor pool, we are equivalent to, if not better than, anybody else. Anywhere in the world.”

The writer is a teacher and freelance journalist living in San Diego, USA

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