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Ideating India

Photo: S. Subramanium

Focussing on the future Nandan Nilekani

It doesn’t take you much time to gauge why he is what he is. Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of India’s successful software story Infosys, is everything you would expect a head honcho of a company to not be. Approachable, affable and importantly, lacking that repulsive know-all attitude.

With his humility and an effort to make himself one among them, Nilekani succeeds in disarming people at once. Many who know him closely say that he then tries injecting his ideas into people. The span of his ideas is not just confined to the software industry — his mainstay — but covers a range of issues that can make India a land of innumerable possibilities.

Moving beyond his immediate circle, Nilekani, armed with his charming smile, is now trying to reach out to the masses with his vision — in the form of a sizeable tome, Imagining India. A Penguin Allen Lane publication, the book is loaded with his “ideas for a new century” cover to cover. To go by his word, “It will take you about seven hours to read it.”

The seasoned entrepreneur explains the genesis behind the book. “India is now in a very interesting position. It’s economy is growing, so is the aspiration of its people. The country is all set to play a bigger role in the world. So, what it now needs is a safety net of ideas.”

You know he is bang on and he knows that “ideas have influenced countries”. Giving his life as an example of how the country has embraced change, Nilekani expresses immense hope in the strength of the people. In the book, too, he devotes a chapter to the power that people can wield. “…it is this new restlessness, the hum and the thrum of its people, that is the sound of India’s economic engine today”, he writes. Once considered a burden, India’s population is today its asset, he reiterates.

“Besides, we have other advantages such as our huge young population, a large number of IT savvy people, and the ability to speak in English,” he says.

“English”, he states, “is a great unifier, a caste solvent”. Also, the language, from a mere legacy of the Raj days, has become an important skill to corner a good job today. “The private sector has been quick in responding to it.

The English training in India is today a 100-million dollar industry in annual revenue,” he points out. He highlights the change with a societal indicator cutting across class barriers: “In Mumbai’s Dharavi slum and the North Shahdara slum in Delhi, over half of the schools are English medium.”

To ensure the book was holistic in its approach, he interviewed 126 people with different types of expertise. “Also, I had a great researcher to dig out the facts.” Nilekani knows many would have expected a memoir from him first rather than a book of ideas. “I could have done that, but I thought ideas are what we need most today,” he says.

However, that doesn’t make his meteoric rise in the corporate world any less important. In fact it establishes the rise of new entrepreneurs in a country built on socialist ideas. Born to a manager with Minerva Mills, he is the second son in a middle class family from Karnataka. Focused on academics, he got his big ticket entry to IIT, Mumbai. Post IIT, like many students of this country then, his eye was also set on a possible scholarship to go abroad. With hesitant steps, he went to Patni Computers (more than two decades ago) to be interviewed by Narayana Murthy, the man with whom he and four others later started Infosys.

His elder brother, Vijay, on hearing the plan called it “a pipedream”, recalls Nilekani. Today, he says, “I am not a very ambitious person. Actually, I was fortunate.”

Ask him what next and he talks of a plan. “I have set up a blog to promote my ideas. Next year, I shall be going to various institutes to talk about them.” Before that, he is on a four-city tour to promote the book.

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