Using Information Technology to Empower the System

Last week, our Club was addressed by F C Kohli, doyen of the Indian IT industry. Introducing him, PP Vithal Palekar said that Faqir Chand Kohli was formerly Deputy Chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and a Padma Bhushan awardee.

Our Club recognized Mr Kohli’s contribution to the IT industry and to the cause of adult education by conferring upon him the first Ramkrishna Bajaj Award for Good Governance, at the hands of Shekhar Bajaj. Responding to the honour, he said, “I am quite overwhelmed by this honour. I had the opportunity and honour to serve on the Board of Tata Electric Companies (Telco), when Mr Ramkrishna Bajaj was also its director. I worked with Telco for 18 years and then from 1969 to 2000, I worked with the Tata Consultancy Services. Since the late 90s, I have developed a third career that involves using IT and other advanced technologies to solve societal problems like employment and education. I would like to share with you what we have been able to do in the last six or seven years towards solving these problems.

“First, I would like to go back to computerization. Some say that India is a super power in computers, but let me tell you that the entire software and hardware industry in India is less than 2% of the world’s industry, so you don’t become a super power with only 2%. The level of computerization in this country is very low. We have spent about 35 million dollars on software, of which 5 million dollars worth was for the domestic use and 30 million dollars worth was for exports — which means that we have been writing software for somebody outside and not for the country.

Why Adult Education

]

“Earlier, the government had a negative mindset about the potential of this technology. Nonetheless, we did very well in exports, as we are intelligent people with an ability to think clearly and with an excellent command over the English language. But what would happen to the 900 million people in this country who do not speak or write English? We felt that if this country was to grow, everybody should be able to use computers. That required two things, affordable hardware and software in Indian languages.

“Six years ago, we said that we should be able to assemble a fully configured computer with a monitor for less than Rs 10,000. Last year HCL and another company came out with such computers. The IITs, the IIITs, the Indian Institute of Science, CDAC and CST worked together on the software and thanks to them, we now have software available in 10 different languages, starting from the operating system, to the middleware system like the search engines, the databases and some applications. Now if we bundle the Rs 10,000 computer with these Indian software, we have every opportunity to take off in this country. We have to realize that most of the country works in local languages and not in English. We think that this will create employment opportunities in the country.

Empowering the Nation

“The total hardware industry in India is just 5 billion dollars and that includes services. Our input of PCs into the country is about 4.5 million per year as against China’s about 20 – 25 million per year. When we have these affordable computers with the Indian languages, we expect that the demand of PCs in India will go upto 20 million in the next two to three years. We also started considering getting into the hardware too, because IT is about hardware and software. In the year 2001, we found that India annually produced only 200 microelectronic engineers who worked on hardware.

“To increase their number, TCS worked out a project with IIT, Bombay to reengineer their department of microelectronic engineering. Two years back we took the entire course book, alongwith the full instruction sets from IIT Bombay and gave it to the Government of India and asked them to select 100 engineering colleges which could use this course to bring up their department of microelectronics. So far, about 20 colleges have been identified. The result is that this year, the country is producing 1,000 microelectronic engineers.

“We have seen that computerization can make not only large-scale operations efficient, but also small-scale operations and individuals efficient. Coimbatore has over 5,000 small mechanical engineering workshops, employing 10 to 20 people each. They produce all the components for the automobile industry, as well as pumps and other light equipment. However, they have no access to computers and computeraided designs and computer-aided manufacturing. Their entire learning is experiential.

“So TCS put up a large portal in Coimbatore and populated it with the Unigraphic CAD-CAM software. We also brought some leaders to help them with marketing. More than 5,000 people have registered with us, and now they will be able to design all the components that they will manufacture on the computer. They will be able to download drawings and instructions, and will also receive help in material sciences. This will increase their productivity and reduce wastages. Our country has 40 other cities like Coimbatore, waiting to be similarly empowered.

“Then we have another project with the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Now with shopping malls coming in this country, what do we do with the 70 to 100 million people who are dependant on small shops? Can we make them more efficient? A new software is being developed at IIT Mumbai, by their Departments of Management Studies and Computer Science, for this purpose.

“Recently, we have tried to apply advanced technology to a two-acre experimental farm in Chennai, where we have set up an agricultural foundation, in collaboration with the Agricultural University of California Davis. Mensans are involved in it and we are involving as many people as possible. So here again the technology involves the combination of mechanical engineering, soil mechanics, chemical engineering and IT. With this farm we wanted to prove that small farms are sustainable.

Reaching to Read & Write

“On the adult education front, we conducted an experiment on 100,000 people in six languages. Of these, 85% were women. 10-12 weeks later, they were able to read the newspapers in their local languages and the women had started reading their children’s books and had also learnt writing on their own. We have given this system to the Government of India and the Knowledge Commission is looking at it. It is not something that we can do by ourselves, because the backlog is a 150 million people. We have also given this system to South Africa and they are using it.

“About 6-7 years back the Government of India had set up a committee which found that this country was not producing enough PhDs in engineering and science streams. We studied the problem and concluded that the PhD studies should begin in the undergraduate year itself and not later in the graduate year. Institutes like the IITs and the IIS and some others, produced about 3000 - 3500 students among themselves, of which 2000 went abroad, and another 700 went for MBA. So we were not left with enough critical mass for the graduate school.

“We got people for the graduate school from other colleges, but the result was that instead of taking 3 to 4 years for completing their PhDs, they took 6 to 8 years. So we thought that this country can’t have just 3,000 to 3,500 bright people!. We looked around for colleges in India where students were scoring 85+ percent in their twelfth. And we found about 50-55 such colleges. Two of those colleges were here in Bombay. Then we did a very thorough gap analysis between these colleges and the IITs on governance, autonomy, finance, curriculum, faculty, library etc and spent almost six months doing a thorough study of it.

“We presented our study to the Government of India. They have now taken the regional engineering colleges out of the universities and made them autonomous.

“We have chosen four colleges in Maharashtra — namely VJTI, the University of Chemical Technology in Mumbai, the Pune Engineering College and also the Engineering College at Nanded — which will be upgraded upto the IIT level. We are training their faculty, we have given them autonomy and are also looking at ways to make them financially independent of the government. We are also working with the Reserve Bank of India to work out certain loan schemes. We are hopeful that in another 2 to 3 years, when all these 50 colleges come into it, we will produce 30,000 world class undergraduate engineers and when we have 30,000 engineers, even if 10,000 go abroad, the rest will still remain in this country.

“We are also looking into the schools of Bombay under Bombay First. The problem is very serious. About 80 to 85% of the students study in the Municipal schools and all our rulers, the MPs, MLAs, corporators come out of these. Their studies are totally neglected here. We did a systematic study of the system. What struck us most was the large number of dropouts from the 8th, 9th and 10th standards at the tender ages of 13, 14 and 15.

“Most thefts and small robberies are committed by children of this age. The strength of each class in these schools is 70 and no teacher can effectively teach so many students. So we have suggested using aids or assistants to these teachers so that the class size could be brought down.

“Then we were told that the good teachers were giving tuitions. We agreed that they had to have something to add to their incomes, and so they should carry on. So we have computerized, as an experiment, the entire tuition in Mathematics, which a person can pay for and take. And the computer will allow a personal contact with the teacher.

“The third one which is very significant is that all schools, including the municipal schools, must have vocational training for all the students. They must learn to work with their hands, whether it is ceramics, photography, carpentry or masonry. We must open new avenues for the people,” Mr F C Kohli said.