Ask HN: India is not a tech country and won't be anytime soon. Your thoughts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: India is not a tech country and won't be anytime soon. Your thoughts?

3 pointsitsmefaz4 comments

I've been in the tech for sometime now and would want to throw some light on few things, and maybe get an alternative perspective on this issue.

The primary economy of the country is Agriculture. There has been no focus on making tech a primary source of income for the country and I don't see it happening anytime soon. One of the reasons why I say this is because our education systems sucks and is 50 years older compared to our counterparts and teach students to consume rather than drive innovation. We are a country with highest young population. Even a small contributions of innovating work would have tremendous impact on the country's economy. However, progress through innovation has to be cultural thing (from home or from our system) and our system lacks both and is not built produce new work but built to consume. We are one big consumer economy, our services market is one of the most influential and quite possibly the greatest progress the country has made in 70 years of independence.

Another problem is that if the country starts driving innovation the economics of the country would fall apart as the internal market might close down the investment and trades, why would foreign nations want other countries to consume the incomes of their people.

The solution to this is either India become a closed market (which was the case earlier, but didn't fare well for the country) or become open to foreign investments and sustain on emergency supplies.

Q. How do the other tech people see this problem and what would leaving the country be a viable option for this?

Q. What are people in similar economies doing in this case eg. Russia?

India follows the "Sheep Herd" mentality. The whole country's economy is based on people getting into "Profitable" domains mostly following the success of a pioneer in the field. The most recent example of this ideology is the "Business Process Outsourcing" industry. New BPO units are propping up here and there at a dime a dozen leading to a quality deterioration in the final deliverable. This process will continue till a saturation level is reached and then they will wait till another "Killer" domain picks up momentum. Till then India will be in a so called "Calm Period" where nothing great and major takes place.

I think many Indians underestimate their country.

I would not compare India to Russia because post-soviet Russia is consciously a petro-state. That is, the government steals from the oil sector, where wealth is highly concentrated, and does not need to develop the economy in other ways. In fact if they did develop the economy in other ways, the government would have to face an empowered civil society which would not always go along with Putin.

Agriculture is a huge industry in the United State and in fact in most countries other than Singapore, the Gaza Strip, etc. It is a source of opportunity that is not going anywhere; populations are going up, people want to eat better (however it is they define better) but if we do nothing there are negative trends that will damage our productivity.

I meet many Indians who complain about the quality of Indian education, many of them are intelligent and very well-educated. Certainly at the masters and PhD level you will do better outside India, it's not clear to me that at the undergraduate level India is any worse than the run-of-the-mill school in the U.S.

As for services, go with what you are good at. At their very best, Indian services companies such as WiPro and Infosys are world-beating. There are challenges in working with people in such a different timezone, but the model of "hire freshers", "give them a lot of supervision", and "offer career paths" can work very well in many ways.

What is the question?

updated!

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