Spotlight: IT: A Passage Through India, The Statesman, April 5,2009

By Aditi Roy Ghatak

When men of mettle clash, sparks fly. That was possibly how the race to win the information technology race in India took off; courtesy the Bhabha and Mahalanobis clash at a time Calcutta was still the centre for scientific excellence – the computing industry included. What began under the visionary Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis as IT’s long revolution, only to lose its way in Calcutta, even as it travelled through Bombay acquiring muscle in Bangalore and Hyderabad is quite a fascinating tale. The origins may be irrelevant in an India where leading multinationals have sited their R&D operations. Nevertheless, the Mahalanobis story – getting India’s first automatic calculators and unit record machines for the Indian Statistical Institute; following it up by a facility to develop and fabricate computing machines locally; driving the non-profit Indian Calculating Machine and Scientific Instrument Research Society to develop calculators and scientific instruments in September 1943; and the then establishing an ISI unit for repair and maintenance of calculators – deserves to be revisited. Who else but Mahalanobis could inspire Samarendra Kumar Mitra and Soumyendra Mohan Bose, outstanding engineers of the times, to go through the junkyards of Chandni Chowk to dig up war material to build India’s first ‘analogue electronic computer’ in 1953 at the ISI’s Electronic Computer Laboratory, made ready for this specific purpose in 1950? The revolution was on track as Mahalanobis got large mainframes from British Tabulating Machine, Ural from the Soviet Union and another computer from IBM and even later when the ISI and Jadavpur University collaborated to developed a digital computer, ISIJU. By then, though, the revolution was encountering a parallel force. Homi J. Bhabha was charting a brilliant course with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research that eventually developed the TIFR Automatic Calculator. Also, Bhabha won the battle for the tag of National Computer Centre for his own computer installations, simultaneously taking the lead in spearheading the electronics development policy, especially after the war with China. Bengal took the back seat since then.

Dinesh C. Sharma’s chronicle The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India’s IT Industry undertakes a journalist’s – rather than a scientist’s journey – through the electronics committee which Bhaba headed, paving the way for the Electronics Commission and the Department of Electronics. The Calcutta initiative had clearly been wrested by Bombay and with the Leftists sowing the seeds of suspicion around computers in the heart and souls of the middle-class Bengali, the computer revolution went way off target in this city.

Birth and Growth of India's IT Industry : Interview in Techgoss April 2, 2009

By Suneetha

Sam Pitroda, widely regarded as the father of the telecom revolution in India, released this historical book by Dinesh C Sharma, a senior tech journalist. “The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India's IT Industry”, while detailing every important milestone in the tech sector, tells us the real story behind what was perceived as IBM's eviction from India in 1977.

Here is an interview with the author Dinesh C Sharma.

Q (Techgoss): How did you get into writing this particular book?
A: (Dinesh C Sharma): I have been a journalist since 1984. My first job as a trainee journalist with the Press Trust of India 1984 exposed me to two generations of data communication technologies – teleprinter with its paper tapes and the computer-based communication network which was just being introduced in the agency. This was also the beginning of my interaction with the information technology industry as a reporter, which continued over the next decade and beyond.

In the late 1990s, I crossed the fence for a brief while. First I – along with two other friends - floated a dotcom company, then worked as part-time head of India operations of a business-to-business portal for software industry launched by a former investment banker from New York. All these experiences gave me valuable insights into inner workings of the industry. Then while reporting for Cnet.com in 2000s, I realized that interest about the Indian industry was growing in America and yet there were a lot of misconceptions. The same was the case with new generation of Indians who were introduced to the sector in late 1990s. So, I thought of writing a book.

When I did so, the first thought that came to my mind was the story of IBM and Coca-Cola being 'thrown out of India' during the Janata Party regime in 1977. As a reporter, I kept hearing different versions of this story. So, I thought here is my story line – from IBM leaving India in 1977 to IBM's comeback in early 1990s. To the journalist inside me, this appeared to me a killer plot. Barring the IBM's exit and the period of early growth of the industry till 1984, I was a witness as well a recorder of all major events in this period. But when I started researching into the IBM episode, I realized the story actually begins when early computing machines came to India in the pre-independence days. That's how the plot got extended. So this is the first book on the Indian IT industry that tells the story right from the day first computers arrived in India. Much of research and writing for this book took place between 2005 and 2007. I got a one-year fellowship from the New India Foundation, Bangalore, for writing the book.
Read full interview at: http://www.techgoss.com/Story/28S13-Birth-and-Growth-of-India-s-IT-Industry.aspx