IT and India

[Srinath S <srinaths@usa.net>]

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I have a few questions for the debators about the IT scene in India. It is not
about software exports or the economics of the IT boom. Rather about putting
IT to use for India. 

Why is it that despite so much of noise about India's IT, there is hardly any
research in IT that takes place in India? Most of the "research" is hardly
technical -- in papers about object orientation for example, there is suddenly
a mention about salaries of OO professionals or company profits using OO. I am
talking about technical research. There is hardly any understanding in India
about the conceptual underpinnings that go behind computer and system
sciences. A lot many professors even, don't know the difference between
functional programming and imperative programming, for example. There is
hardly anyone asking how IT could be used in our daily life. 

In fact, over the years I have coined this term "solution probleming" to best
describe the chaos. No one wants to research our problems at their face value;
but instead want to implement existing solutions from eslewhere, verbatim.
Given the diversity of Indian languages, one would have expected, for example,
translation technologies to have been first proposed in India. But no, there
is hardly any standards for information storage and retrieval in Indian
languages, leave alone translation. The Indian society is so rich in diversity
and its associated complexity; one would think that this is the perfect
setting for research on complex systems and general systems theory. But no,
researchers only want to talk about whether Microsoft's COM is simply bad
CORBA or whether Oracle is easier to use than Sybase. 

Over the years I have also coined two more terms: "market correctness" and
"technical correctness". In India we seem to be overtly obsessed with market
correctness -- which makes most money. But markets are something artificial
and the global marketplace has a number of discrepancies (more on that in some
other mail). Eventually it is simply technical correctness which prevails. If
we don't leverage on IT to get a better understanding of what India is; and
fail to acknowledge its realities, the market simply moves over to some better
places. Market correctness will simply fizzle out... 

-srinath 


Ideas for India: Building the future -- together 
http://www.ideasforindia.net/ 

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