Observations on India

and

Infosys Mysore

Summer 2008

 

■     Mysore is a city of approximately one million people in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, 12.3° north latitude, about 87 miles southwest of Bangalore (a three to four hour drive). The primary language of Karnataka is Kannada.

 

■     The co-chairman of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, used the phrase, ''The playing field is being leveled'' in 2004 in an interview with Thomas Friedman, who then used a rephrasing of it as the title of his book, “The World is Flat.”

 

■     Infosys may invest more on the education of its employees than any other company. The Global Education Center in Mysore is being expanded to be able to train concurrently 13,000 employees (by July 1) as compared to the current 3,000. The cost of the buildings, housing, food, teachers, and the employees’ time must be tremendous. The expenditures should provide the company with a competitive advantage in the future.

 

■     The Infosys Mysore campus is one of the most beautiful in the world. Each building has a different and stunning architecture. It has immaculate, picture-perfect, tropical landscaping. However, what sets it apart is that it has minimal motorized vehicular traffic on a campus about the size of NC State’s historic campus. The lower noise and emissions levels make it a relaxing and serene environment.

 

■     Infosys’s vision to retain a competitive advantage (other than on price) is to focus on quality software, the best in the world, and to take advantage of demographics. The US has an aging population of software developers while India has a growing number of young software developers.

 

■     Having a class taught by a US professor in India was a first for Infosys. Rather than send employees to the US to study, they brought the professor to India. They want their employees to be the best in the world. One purpose was to gauge where they are in this quest. The course taught was equivalent to CSC, 541, Advanced Data Structures, at NC State University. It was not condensed but compressed from 15 weeks into three weeks.

 

■     The students in the class were enthusiastic about learning the material, asked excellent questions which gave insights into understanding the material, and suggested many ways to possibly improve the data structures and algorithms. The students seemed to enjoy learning. The top students in the course equaled or exceeded the performance of students at NC State. The attendance was perfect or near-perfect each day. Twenty-seven of the 28 students who began the course completed it.                                      

 

■     An enjoyable tradition was having a break in the class at 10:30 a.m. for morning tea. The tea, which is hot, contains milk and sugar and sometimes spices such as cardamon and ginger.

 

■     Because India has such a large population, and one which uses English as the de facto national language, it has the ability to compete readily in the global marketplace. The US will not be able to compete with India’s numbers. Since relatively small numbers percentage wise of India’s population are now involved in software and engineering, it has considerable opportunity for growth in these areas.

 

■     India is changing rapidly. One example is the Bangalore airport. The one at which we arrived was small, unclean, crowded, and had no obvious parking plan. The roads at the airport were dirt and were dusty. It was definitely by far the worst of more than100 airports I have traveled to over the years. The new airport from which we departed is among the best in the world, and it is certainly one of the most spacious. The contrast between the two is incredible and indicative of what is happening in India. It has been challenging for India to provide the infrastructure to cope with its rapid growth. However, that will come.

 

■     What might be done to ensure the US’s competitiveness and leadership in software development? I make no claim to have an answer. However, from my observations, it will be necessary for faculty in the US to discover new ways to engage and motivate the typical student in current generation of students. Perhaps that will occur with a greater use of gaming or more visual methods of teaching. It will also be important to place a greater emphasis in engineering and computer science education on the right brain skills, skills which are central to innovating the best products, services, and processes in the world.

 

■     Many Indian-born, but US educated software engineers are now returning to India. The US can no longer count on them for providing the shortfall in US-born software engineers. This situation is perhaps why it will be necessary for US companies to turn to Indian software companies for a reason other than price.

 

■     The Indian society in South India appeared much more relaxed than that in the US. Perhaps for that reason, all the people we interacted with from drivers, to technical staff, to housekeepers, to restaurant staff, to guides, to shopkeepers were all extremely accommodating and not prone to errors. Offering such outstanding customer service and introducing minimal errors may also provide them a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. The time and effort spent correcting errors, which appear to be on the rise and epidemic in the US, is costly to businesses.

 

■     As noted previously, India has a large population. To keep them employed, many tasks are done by people which could easily be done more efficiently, e.g., women with hammers make gravel by breaking larger stones into smaller ones, or people move dirt or sand to or from a truck or a short distance using small, shallow pans. This situation implies that there is an abundance of people power that can be readily redeployed as needed to keep India competitive.

 

■     Many products and processes at Infosys and in India were better than those encountered before, e.g., the whiteboard markers (finer point), erasers (more control), inexpensive red pens (smooth flowing ink), taking an umbrella from one building and leaving at another, picture frames (easy to hang), airport luggage carts (roll effortlessly), cars sounding alerts when backing up, or brake lights flashing multicolors when brakes are applied.

 

■     What is most amazing about India is its traffic, in particular that I did not witness an accident or see anyone killed. If a highway has a median divider with two lanes in each direction, that implies that it was intended for three or more lanes with pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, auto rickshaws, trucks (lorries), busses, cars and cow-pulled carts all vying for the same space. On an undivided highway, the traffic is more thrilling than the most scary ride at an amusement park. It doesn’t matter which direction someone is traveling; the space on the highway is for anyone going in any direction. In the short span of a few hours one afternoon, I counted at least 30 near miss head-on collisions. What makes the traffic in India work is that everyone seems to cooperate and adjust speeds or locations to avoid accidents. The professional drivers in India should be compensated more than 747 pilots for their tasks are much more complex. Just a second of inattention of a driver and someone could be killed.

 

One traffic scene is unforgettable. It was as if appeared from a science fiction movie with strange creatures (vehicles) moving about, up, and down, in a dirt-covered area about the size of a city block, which was completely inundated with huge ruts of three to four feet. Some vehicles were going down into these gullies and some were coming up every which way. There was no organization; people (in vehicles) traveling in both directions were trying to find a path across this field. The field was dusty from all the traffic. To traverse the field, it was necessary to navigate through a series of these depressions. There was not a straight path. The reason for this adventure is that an interchange on the new outer ring around Bangalore had not yet been completed. So this was a (the) way to get from one section of modern highway to another.

 

■     You may think that South India in the summer is hot. Well, it was hot at midday, but the morning and evenings were delightful.

 

■     NC State should consider establishing a branch campus in India, perhaps in conjunction with Infosys, not only to provide US students, especially computer science students, an opportunity to spend a semester abroad learning more about the people and land that they will need to be familiar with in a global economy, but also to educate many of the Indian graduate students who throng to the US for education.