The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution PDF
Preview The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution
The Outsourcer History of Computing William Aspray and Thomas J. Misa, editors Janet Abbate, Gender in the History of Computing: Reimagining Expertise, Opportunity, and Achievement through Women’s Lives John Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer William Aspray and Paul E. Ceruzzi, The Internet and American Business William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, and Emerson W. Pugh, IBM’s Early Computers Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch, editors, Makin’ Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer John Hendry, Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry Michael Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage, and Georg and Edvard Scheutz David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac René Moreau, The Computer Comes of Age: The People, the Hardware, and the Software Arthur L. Norberg, Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946–1957 Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology Emerson W. Pugh, Memories that Shaped an Industry Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer, IBM’s 360 and Early 370 Systems Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of the SAGE Air Defense Computer Alex Roland with Philip Shiman, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Ma- chine Intelligence, 1983–1993 Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen, editors, The First Computers—History and Architectures Dinesh C. Sharma, The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution Dorothy Stein, Ada: A Life and a Legacy John Vardalas, The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence, 1945–1980 Maurice V. Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer The Outsourcer The Story of India’s IT Revolution Dinesh C. Sharma The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology First edition published in India in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers India as The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India’s IT Industry. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected]. This book was set in Stone by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sharma, Dinesh C. [Long revolution] The outsourcer : The story of India’s IT revolution / Dinesh C. Sharma. pages cm—(History of computing) Originally published as: The long revolution. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-02875-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Computer software industry— India—History. 2. Information technology—India—History. I. Title. HD9696.63.I42S48 2015 338.4'70050954—dc23 2014031500 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Ramachandra Guha who ignited my interest in contemporary history and has been a constant source of encouragement, inspiration, and energy Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi List of Acronyms xiii Exchange Rate of Indian Rupee vis-à-vis U.S. Dollar (End-of-Year Rates) xix Introduction 1 1 India’s First Computers 7 2 The Beginning of State Involvement 39 3 The Rise, Fall, and Rise of IBM 55 4 The Dawn of the Computer Age in India 77 5 Discovering a New Continent 105 6 Software Dreams Take Flight 131 7 The Transition to Offshore 157 8 Turning Geography into History 185 9 Conclusion: The Making of a Digital Nation 207 Notes 219 Index 241 Preface Today computers—and other forms of digital technology—are ubiquitous in India. It was not so thirty-five years ago. I became aware of the use of computers in lives of ordinary Indians when I got a computerized mark sheet for my tenth-grade examination in June 1976. A few years later, I was formally introduced to computer science during my undergraduate course in science at Nizam College in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. An introductory course in FORTRAN IV—a computer language released by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in 1962—taught stu- dents basics of programming, without them seeing or touching a computer. At the end of the course, we were all taken to the College of Engineering at Osmania University to see an IBM mainframe. The computer was placed in a large, air-conditioned hall and we were allowed in small batches to have a peek at the gigantic machine. This brief encounter with an aging computer helped kindle my interest in this technology. In my first job as a trainee journalist with the Press Trust of India news- wire, in early 1984 I was exposed to two generations of data communica- tion technologies—a teleprinter that stored news stories in paper tapes and a computer-based communication network that had just been introduced. It was also the beginning of my interaction with the nascent computer industry as a reporter, an engagement that continued over the next decade and beyond. In the late 1990s, I crossed the fence for a brief while when the dot-com bug bit me. I, along with another journalist friend and budding software engineer, incorporated a dot-com company to run a science and technology news portal. Needless to say, the venture did not last long. Another opportunity in the dot-com boom followed soon. This time a friend in the United States introduced me to a former investment banker from New York who wished to create a business-to-business portal for Indian software firms. As part-time head of India operations of this com- pany for about eighteen months, I came face to face with several software
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