'A fascinating account of Indian IT' : The Tribune

India’s IT success story
Review by D. S.Cheema, The Tribune, July 4, 2010

THIS book is a fascinating account of how the tapestry of information technology (IT) in India has been woven by the hand of history in the past four decades. This objective record is a fitting tribute to the industry, which contributes maximum to the Indian economy, and also to the exceptional contribution of men like Mahalanobis, Bhabha, Bhatnagar, Naval B. Tata, M.G.K. Menon, Sam Pitroda, Naren Patni, Azim Premji, Narayna Murthy and many others who nurtured the industry during its formative years. These men looked boldly to the future and peered beyond the common to fight the deep-rooted "license-permit culture" and helped in the ultimate triumph of the Indian IT industry. This romance has not waned a bit; in fact, the industry is scaling new heights, thanks to the solid foundation laid by many visionaries.

The eventful story of Indian IT industry has been told in a cogent manner by the author, a journalist with deep insight into science and technology communication. The foreword by Sam Pitroda, who has played a very significant role in the story and is a witness to the entire saga of IT development in India, rightly sees it emerging as "a great social leveler" from a mere "rationed commodity".

Full review at:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100704/spectrum/book3.htm

'A book for every right thinking Indian' : Yojana

By Suryakant Sharma, Yojana, February 2010

India owes its spectacular success in the IT sector to the vision, scientific temperament, commitment and perseverance of many - starting from our first Prime
Minister late Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, to legendary scientists and statisticians like Dr. Homi J. Bhabha and PC Mahalanobis, right down to the Indian bureaucracy, technocracy and industry. IT is perhaps the most widely written about technology
sector in the country, but one rarely comes across literature bringing out the role of the government in developing the sector.

It is this gap that Dr Dinesh Sharma's book fills up, focusing on the government's role elaborately and lucidly. The book traces the history of India’s IT revolution, from the first generation of computers from UK/USA in the early 1960s and the decision to install a hired IBM 1401 machine in 1964.

Monumental work, says "Technology Review"

The Accidental Revolution
India’s $73 billion information technology industry emerged out of nowhere to the powerhouse it is today within four decades thanks to a series of unrelated happenings in the country and abroad.
By Narayanan Suresh, Technology Review, FEBRUARY 2010

When Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric bulb in the latter part of 19th century, he did not foresee the emergence public and home lighting and a huge global power generation and transmission industry. Similarly, laying the foundation stone for today’s aviation industry would hardly have been the main thought in the minds of Wright brother when they designed the human civilization’s first flying machine.The history of humans in the last few centuries is full of such examples of ingenuity of the inhabitants of our planet turning many small steps into collective giant leaps for all in thousands of unimaginable ways.

India’s information technology (IT) industry also owes its creation to one such act that happened at the opposite end of the globe. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had decided to discontinue teaching of electrical engineering courses in power transmission and electrical machines in the early 1960s. Naren Patni, son of a textile mill owner in Rajasthan, was not aware of this change in MIT when he landed there to pursue higher studies in electrical engineering after getting a no-strings attached scholarship from the Grass Foundation, Massachusetts.

So Patni had to opt to study the newly introduced courses in control systems which were designed to train engineers to handle analog control systems of a variety of modern equipment such as gun turret controls and radar tracking systems. The western world, after the Second World War was moving towards greater use of analog computing methods in industrial production process and control systems.

Patni later met many other pioneers who were working on different aspects of computing. He also happened to work with the team that was converting large amounts of court documents and other public data into magnetic tapes using the rudimentary punching paper tapes. Patni saw the opportunity to get this work done cheaply in India. He founded Patni Computer Services (PCS) as one of the first Indian companies specializing in handling outsourcing services. The famed founders of Infosys were among the first set of employees of PCS and the innocuous decision of MIT to discontinue teaching electrical engineering had played a major role in seeding the growth of India’s IT industry.

The MIT and Patni story is just one of hundreds of happenings in various parts of India and the rest of the world that has had a major impact on the formation of India’s now much-acclaimed IT sector. Veteran science journalist, Dinesh C Sharma, based in New Delhi for nearly three decades, has attempted to document as many of these seemingly disparate happenings which have in some ways contributed to the emergence of the Indian IT industry. Sharma’s monumental effort has appeared as a Harper Collins book, THE LONG REVOLUTION, the birth and growth of India’s IT industry. Sharma’s decades of journalistic writing skills have been admirably combined with the rigors of academic research. The 427-page IT story has been embellished with 36 pages of extensive references, making it an extremely valuable resource for future researchers of India’s IT segment.

Read full review at :http://www.technologyreview.in/computing/24487/