From IT boom to sustainability: India’s new challenges

The IT Boom of the early 2000s was a major technological and economic event that transformed India and the world. It filled the world’s need for IT services, it uplifted millions of people from poverty, it positioned India as the central node in the world’s technology network, and it transformed the way the world works. But two decades later it has brought on a whole new set of challenges in sustainability. This short article describes these challenges as well as some work carried out between the Sharada Educational Trust and the Bern University of Applied Sciences to help combat these challenges.

To properly understand today’s sustainability challenges in India, we must first understand the past. Many people believe the low-cost nature of high-tech Indian labor, together with the rise of the Internet, gave rise to the Indian IT Boom; this was the topic of the now famous The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Sadly, this misses some essential points.

For thousands of years India has been the leader in Asia for science, technology, and innovation. Thanks to the mathematician Aryabhata India was the birthplace of the decimal system and zero; Indian treatises contain the earliest recorded use of surgery and vaccinations by physicians such as Sushruta and Charaka. Indeed, the ancient universities of Nalanda and Takshashila, dating back to 600 BCE, were vast epicenters of knowledge before globalization existed. The Indian culture itself embodies Jugaad, a philosophy of flexible problem solving and innovation that is now an established management practice for “frugal engineering.”

More recently, the famous lines about “the rockets’ red glare” in the U.S. national anthem refer to rockets developed in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore. The 18^th century ruler Tipu Sultan utilized iron-cased rockets against the British East India Company, one of the earliest uses of rocketry in warfare. This technology was refined by Sir William Congreve, inspiring the lines written by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812.

The most recent groundwork for the IT Boom was laid by institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), established in 1910 and the 1950s, respectively. These became the sources of high-caliber engineering talent who were not only proficient in technical skills but also entrepreneurial in spirit.

In America in the 1970’s, the IT industry first tapped into this talent. As discussed in the this article, a high-tech labor shortage in Silicon Valley led some enterprising American companies to talent-pools in India, recruit their top engineers. The pre-Internet solution was to bring this talent onshore, so the Indian colleagues could work side-by-side with their American counterparts. The famous H-1B visa for technology professionals was established in 1990, and it may be the chief reason why Silicon Valley rapidly became an international mecca.

The IT Boom

The IT Boom was not only transformative for India but for the whole world. Starting slowly in the late 1990s but gaining rapid ground with the Y2K scare, demand for IT talent from India exploded, and large global companies (such as Infosys, Wipro, and Tata/TCS) rose to fill demand. This not only lifted hundreds of thousands of technology professionals out of poverty, but also catalyzed a ripple-effect across related industries. An expanded middle class fueled a surge in real estate, retail, hospitality, education, and health care; in short, a new ecosystem developed for professionals and their families.

Interestingly, what many Westerners may not be familiar with are some of the very innovative business practices that emerged during the boom. Indian companies engaged in mass recruitment drives, each hiring thousands or even tens of thousands of new employees per month, often recruiting them before their graduation. Large companies such as Infosys created massive training campuses where new hires (called “freshers”) underwent training programs, often requiring the refreshers to live on site for weeks or even months.  In a practice known as the “bench system” large numbers of employees were trained but not assigned to projects, ensuring manpower could be instantly deployed when new IT projects were secured. Even today some companies practice a “customer university” program, where IT employees working for a large customer are put through an exhaustive program, to make sure they are experts on the history, corporate culture, and processes of customers they are serving. This is truly IT on a scale much greater than anything in the west.

Water problems and particulate matter

The post-Boom sustainability challenges facing urban India are well known. The concentration of wealth and opportunities in urban centers has put pressure on the cities, and the infrastructure struggles to keep pace. It is estimated that drivers in Bangalore and Mumbai spend an extra 243 hours in traffic each year. As of a few years ago, there was an estimated deficit of 19 million housing units. And the metropolises such as New Dehli are in the topmost polluted cities, with particulate matter levels exceeding WHO safe limits, often by more than 20 times.  Additionally, the impacts of man-made global warming are taking their toll. Extreme weather events are a new normal, including both flooding as well as severe heatwaves at life-threatening levels. Water shortages have led to the need for freshwater to be carried to the cities on railroads. And the demand for electricity often outstrips supply, leading to prolonged and regular power outages that affect both industrial output and quality of life.

Unique Posts-Boom challenges for rural India

The Boom has created whole new sustainability issues for rural India. Two decades after the Boom, those first generation “boomers” are now the senior technology professionals in the middle and upper classes in India today. Their children now joining the workforce have been highly educated (often in private schools), they have grown up with modern technology, and in many cases they speak fluent English. Indeed, in a way that distinguishes many of them from their counterparts in the west, the new post-Boom generation has a true global affinity and can appreciate the global business culture, having been raised by parents working in international projects or even living abroad.

While this is an advantage to global companies looking for an Asian footprint, it has created tremendous challenges for rural India. The widening digital divide impedes the rural youth’s ability to engage with a job market prioritizing IT skills and English proficiency. Rural educators grapple with scant resources and often lack the necessary training to equip students with these in-demand skills. The high attrition rate among teachers, drawn to urban centers for better prospects, disrupts educational continuity, leaving rural students underprepared for a digitized global economy.

But there are also other post-Boom sustainability challenges. The migration to urban centers has strained the social fabric of the rural communities, presenting age-related demographic challenges. The technology gap is increasingly widening, with rural communities lacking access to digital tools and high-speed Internet. And finally, unsustainable agricultural practices and industrial pollution are taking their toll.

How the BFH helps

The Bern University of Applied Sciences has been working for almost a year with the Sharada Educational trust to combat some of these issues in two ways.  One innovative and inspiring program is known as Marga Darshak, in which underprivileged female college students from rural villages are put into a global mentoring program. By providing face-to-face interactions via videoconferencing, these students are given the chance to interact with and learn from global experts that they would otherwise have no access to. This not only helps them to develop global communication skills and cultural fluency, but more importantly, as it targets young women, it inspires tremendous motivation, not only from the mentees themselves but also from their extended circles of fellow students. The students are also exposed to the culture, history, and education system of foreign countries, by involving individuals from these countries. So far, this has included Switzerland, Russia, Australia, Sweden, and the UAE.

In another project, a team of BFH computer science students is working closely with the Sharada Educational Trust to develop a “made-for-rural India” software application for teaching English as a foreign language. Here there are technical challenges, such as providing a simple access to teaching materials, often on out-dated or low-cost mobile devices; user-interface challenges, such as usability for groups of people unfamiliar with modern applications; and even learning challenges, in which English learning is not only targeted to the students from rural government schools but also to the educators, not all of whom may have a high proficiency in English.

These are just baby-steps into a vital area that requires significantly more attention and involvement. The hope is to gain sustained success with each of these, so that the small actions here can be subsequently built upon. But hopefully they can serve in some small way as inspiration to other individuals and organizations who wish to join in combating these challenges.

More information

• The Sharada Trust is a partner of the BFH: https://sharadatrust.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kenritley_comprehensive-report-on-the-sulabh-app-launch-activity-7199358117329911809-aeP2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
• Summary of the final thesis “Learning Management System (LMS) for Rural India” by students in the Bachelor of Computer Science programme, Tobias Erpen, Alayne Larissa Hiltmann, Lukas Vogel:  https://bfh.easydocmaker.ch/search/abstract/3973/