High time India becomes a product power

Koo opened with a lot of fanfare as Twitter’s rival in India. A lot of politicians jumped on the bandwagon. It went viral in Brazil too. Koo got a lot of buzz and funding but in the end, it shut down. That’s been the story of many Indian products.

We were a poor country and struggled with finances post-1947 but still tried our best where tech was concerned. There is a famous picture of ISRO scientists taking parts of their launch equipment on a bullock cart and car. They have really struggled but ended up becoming the No. 1 low-cost and high-quality space agency in the world.

We took a beating when “Father of the Indian nuclear programme” Homi Bhabha died in a plane crash in 1966. In 1977, the newly elected Janata government threw IBM out of India and set back our computing progress. 

We started recovering in the late 1980s, though there were setbacks. The government had launched an ambitious project called the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali (Punjab) which started production in 1984. In 1989, a mysterious fire broke out and we lost our advantage. You could say that we are going full steam ahead only in the 2020s. Think how much of the chip advantage we lost in the last few decades.

There was Liberalization in 1991, the coming of the Internet in 1995 and the Y2K crisis in 1999. All this started putting India on the map. We had the smartphone and startup revolution in the 2000s and 2010s and could compete with the world.

UPI is a clear pathbreaking FinTech leader in the world. After the pandemic, Make in India apps like Ola, Swiggy, Zomato, Zerodha etc took off. But while there are so many apps and products doing well domestically, we are yet to make a dent globally apart from UPI.

Our largest mobile messaging system WhatsApp, biggest social networking Facebook etc are all American. We are nowhere near the trillion-dollar valuation giants: Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Tesla. For that our products: Both software and hardware will have to start doing well in global markets.

In the 1980s and 1990s we were very ambitious. We were producing hardware and even attempted an operating system at par with Sun’s Solaris. 1990s Lotus President Jeff Papows told DQ recently about the chances of India’s 2047 mission…

“Why not India, you have the people, the education, the technology wherewithal. The weakness to avoid is a picture painted in part today of India as just a cheaper alternative to other computer science skills. You can be so much more than that.”

Time to go on to the next stage then!