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Bikram Vohra has a formula for India's IT industry

The country's $110-billion worth tech industry is capable of creating its own Silicon Valley

While US President Trump may be multi-tasking as he fights hostility on many fronts, the Indian student or professional is not marked off as his enemy. Not for now, not forever. On the contrary, if there were a pull out of that vat of talent or a blockade on fresh flow, the ones to be most damaged would be the American infrastructures. India is the numero uno sourcing option and accounts for nearly 70 per cent of the $130-billion industry. He isn't going to mess with that unless he wants to shoot himself in the foot. Silicon Valley would go belly up.
But that does not mean Indians should not see in the situation a great opportunity to create a new dimension to their careers as they drive down the IT highway. By the end of this year India would have crossed 5,000 start-ups and have as many as 300,000 people working directly in IT. There is no need for this country to worry about exporting itself.
Thing is, can Indian companies display the gravel in the gut to rework the dynamics and flip the situation on its head. Not only bring home Indians to an equally efficient state-of-the-art infrastructure for civil and military research and application but also make it attractive for the best of the world's minds to come work in India.
Against this canvas, Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy makes a very valid point when he says that Indian software companies should put aside concerns over the Trump doctrine to restrict the H2-B visas for Indians. There is no need for any panic.
He says even in the unlikely event anything untoward was to occur, so be it because the reverse traffic would galvanise the Indian industry and make it more universal and multi-cultural - which means global.
In a perfect world that would be logical. But the perception and the reality are two sides of a wide river. This is one area where Trump may pass a bill in general but there is a very low chance he will put the squeeze on Indian expertise. To do so would be to cripple his own nation's security and hi-tech systems, especially considering his paranoia over breaches; the whole Hillary Clinton fiasco; the 22 million hacked addresses ostensibly by China; and the accusation that the Russians leaped over the US firewalls without getting singed. With Moscow as the frontrunner for having messed about with the electronic vote to help Trump win the presidency, this accusation may be a mythical legend but there will always be takers for the possibility that it truly happened.
Keeping these priorities in mind and the fact that he sees Indians as benign immigrants, one can even stretch the option of his increasing the quota without actually setting it in stone or amplifying intent publicly.
All of this is mutually exclusive from the Narayana-Murthy wake-up call to the now relatively moribund yet paradoxically explosively potent Indian IT industry. It seems to have lost a bit of its verve and zest as a career choice and seems to amble along on fragmented promises even as more genius illuminates its path. To seize the day demands courage, which has to come from the top. The days of romanticised garage and basement start-up developers and experimenters must render space to a more organised world-class architectural blueprint. In short an Indian Silicon Valley.
For the layman who does not care very much for the technical aspects, the Indian infrastructure for communications is still primitive and even basic mobile phone signals in what is supposedly a nationwide eruption of purchase are suspect. The 4G performance is also open to debate and many a city provides intermittent signals where one has to play 'statue' to keep a conversation going.
From that basic ineptitude in levels of service and maintenance to complex IT applications across the board, Indian acumen is par excellence but gets exported at the top level because of the salary structure and the opportunity for research and experimentation.
Indians have either chosen not to contest the speed needed on the information highway and the platforms it provides or cannot find the vehicle to get going. So they still work piecemeal on harsh budgets and innovative concepts, often engaging in ad hoc and improvised scenarios. There is no arguing the fact that nothing has grown or matured or developed faster than computer technology. Aviation, the leader for long, took 100 years to achieve what IT has done in 10, if not less.
Whether it is hardware, software, programming, backend or maintenance, India has that ability.
But unless Indians allow fresh winds to come in and do a U-turn on the highway, bringing in not just Indians but the world to their desk top per se by offering better pay packets, more incentives for research, creating hi-tech teams and harnessing this massive pool of talent for itself and through it, India will be losing a major opportunity.and its capability to position itself as the global leader.
Pegged at a $110 billion business in India, IT could raise its own profile dramatically if it were to see the bigger picture and take on the world rather than settle for domestic backslapping. That protectionism is self-defeating. Global entrants will give its own people so much more of a challenge and added dimension and make them the planet's actual number one IT pool of talent.
Don't think for one moment that Trump or the Congress will allow their own industry to be adversely affected by the thousands of Indians who are vital to the functioning of US civil and military systems, not just as cogs in the wheel but as the brains of the project.
If organisations like Infosys, Wipro, TCS lead from the front and other entrepreneurs from India and abroad make that investment then these magnificent men and women will be given more of an opportunity and the H2B visas won't even count. Then watch the highway add lane after lane.
Bikram Vohra is a former editor of Khaleej Times