Indians can innovate

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s contention that Indians cannot innovate is wide off the mark. It is just that, like on the hockey field, we stumble at the finish, unable to convert great ideas and brilliant prototypes into world-beating products.

Long before the iPhone made its debut in 2007, Indians had developed a world beater, rich in features that are now found in all smartphones: no keys but just a touch screen, being only one among many. The Simputer, developed at the Indian Institute of Science, was for quite some time the most talked about technological product from India, frequently figuring positively in the international media. Then it died.

I was there at its creation, witnessing the device’s advent first hand, and interacting with the faculty members who conceived of and developed it. It was a most elegant device, the kind Steve Jobs, with his eye for simple design, would have approved of. An aspirational product like that required scale that only government could provide, but that never came.

The electric car is another story. My friend, Sudarshan Maini, the brilliant engineer-entrepreneur who developed the Reva electric car, had sound business sense. His company, astonishingly, through the early years of this millennium, was the largest producer and exporter of electric passenger vehicles in the world, a record it held for years. The car had limited success in India but was quiet a hit in foreign markets, emerging as the best-selling electric vehicle in the U.K. where a lot of them still run.

At my request Mr. Sudarshan sent across three Revas, modified for postal use in Kerala, where I was the Chief Postmaster General. For 18 months and over thousands of kilometres the Revas ferried mail across Thiruvananthapuram with unheard-of reliability, never once breaking down even in the heaviest rains, easily taking the city’s ultra-narrow lanes in their stride. The Reva was a high-visibility product in a small city, noticed and appreciated by all those who saw it. A few fisherfolk even considered it an alternative to their noisy, gas-guzzling autorickshaw trucks to ferry their catch from nearby landing-points to markets inland. Distressingly there wasn’t a single enquiry or expression of interest from the State government. The Postal Department, even as it came to know of its potential through our end-of-trial report, failed to capitalise on it.

Innovation in India needs timely government support and the right kind of promotion. This would have enabled the Simputer, not the iPhone, to emerge as a much sought-after communication device.

Generous tax breaks would have seen Reva evolve as a mass electric vehicle, spawning a world-beating electric car industry right here in India, long before it struck roots in the U.S. or China. We must learn to nurture the innovations emerging from India, rather than sigh with Mr. Wozniak, that Indians as a people are incapable of innovation.

Uday Balakrishnan is Visiting Faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore