India grew by 7.3 per cent year-on-year in the last quarter and is cementing its position as one of the few bright spots in a flailing global economy. Yet for all its apparent sense, it is pilloried for not being good at developing smart ideas.
Experts worry innovation — the key to getting the economy moving, creating jobs and solving the energy crisis — is lacking in a country of more than one billion people.
IT industrialist and Infosys Co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy recently triggered some long overdue soul-searching among think tanks, Indian businesses and hallowed educational institutions, particularly the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institute of Science, when he asked: “Have the institutions [of higher education] over the past 60-plus years contributed to making our society and the world a better place? Is there one invention from India that has become a household name in the globe? The reality is that there is no such contribution from India in the past 60 years.”
According to the latest Economic Survey, India’s capacity for innovation is lower than other Brics countries, apart from Russia. Unlike nations such as China and South Africa, university-industry collaboration on research and development in India is insignificant. Apart from the successes of the Indian Space Research Organisation and some commercial innovation in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors, the country lacks product innovators. That said, programmes such as the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises’ (MSME) Design Clinic Scheme are being set up to address the problem and improve MSMEs through design and innovation.
Success vs failure
Although the country never fails to take pride in the achievements of the hundreds of Indian-born engineers in Silicon Valley, Indian successes abroad have little to do with the fact that they are Indian. When Satya Nadella was appointed CEO of Microsoft, political commentator R. Jagannathan, arguing whether his appointment is a feather in India’s cap or a slap in the face of the Indian system, said, “If Nadella had remained in India, he would probably be working as a coder in Infosys or TCS.”
The reasons India is falling behind in innovation are deep and fundamental. According to the World Economic Forum’s second Human Capital Report, released last year, India’s lagging performance is in part a product of poor strategy and ineffective leadership, leading to deterioration in the factors that improve human capital: “Education and research and development need a serious and pragmatic attention from the Indian policymakers.”
The report adds that not only is the R&D at large Indian companies yielding marginal results, but the education system, based on rote learning with no room for creativity, is agonisingly flawed. “Equality of entrance opportunity and funding and a vision to create knowledge are the hallmarks of world-class education systems. Rather than tinkering with the operational aspects of education, India should step back and evaluate the overall mission of its tertiary education system.”
Most of India’s higher education in science and technology, other than the IITs, National Institute of Technology and a few other national institutions, has been taken over by the private sector, which is purely driven by profit. As Murthy alluded to, the mechanisms of top institutions have so far failed to maximise the intellectual capital or filter their expertise.
Socio-cultural barriers such as cumbersome policies, bureaucratic challenges, corruption and the absence of social security also hinder ideas and an enterprising spirit. These constraints encourage battle for basics, discourage creativity, and lead to a preference for predictable paths.
Using the euphemism of improved efficiency, India has mastered the art of jugaad, which refers to a quick-fix attitude of frugal innovation. But can cheap technology in the name of affordability really pass off as innovation?
“I don’t think the lack of innovation in India, such as it may be, reflects a focus on cheap technology,” Jean Drèze, a development economist and author, tells GN Focus. “On the contrary, it is in the field of cheap technology that the lack of innovation is most striking.
“To illustrate, an Indian bicycle today looks exactly the same as 40 years ago. There are still no gears or lights, let alone an electric motor of the kind commonly found in China.”
At a recent gathering of industrialists and bankers in Mumbai, Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan pointed out improvs are not enough to survive in a globalised marketplace. Emphasising there’s no easy way to the top, he said: “Jugaad is a thoroughly Indian way of coping — it encourages an attitude of shortcuts and evasions, none of which help the quality of final products or sustainable economic growth.”
Scientists and engineers are obvious important players. “There is an enormous scope for technological improvement of simple items such as stoves, toilets and railway coaches,” explains Drèze, a former member of the National Advisory Council. “However, Indian scientists and policymakers tend to be far more interested in advanced technology such as biometrics and supersonic aircraft.
“This is one symptom, among others, of the lack of influence of the unprivileged on public policy.”
What are the possible solutions?
Given the challenges of creating jobs for a 500-million strong workforce in the next 30 years, pulling millions out of poverty, providing sanitation and clean energy, the Department of Science and Technology and the Confederation of Indian Industry highlighted investment, engaging in sustainable, inclusive innovations, industry-academia interaction and adequate harvesting of experience from large-scale failures and success as urgent measures to encourage innovators.
Encouraging creativity and innovation through serious research and development must become the cornerstone of Make in India, said Shashi Tharoor, a Congress parliamentarian from Kerala, at the Growth Net, a discussion on initiatives for and challenges to robust growth. “We are not coming up with products that are simplified versions of more complex and expensive things.”
Innovation is the application of new ideas to solve problems. No jugaad will fix this.
