Beginning of IT Industry in India

Recently “The Economist” printed the career of TCS's CEO Mr. S Ramadorai. In this story they have mentioned the initial days of IT Industry in India. Excerpts:

“Mr Ramadorai’s career at TCS parallels the rise of the industry itself. The Tata group first ventured into computers in 1968, serving its own companies with second-hand IBMs and an early ICL machine. Forty years later, India’s first software company is also its biggest, earning revenues of $5.7 billion in the year to March. Today it is difficult to appreciate the audacity and improbability of its success. In the 1970s India had a shortage of foreign exchange and an abundance of labour. The government did not make it easy for companies to spend precious dollars importing computers, which many suspected would only displace jobs. Even calculating the tariff was a computational feat. On the new Burroughs computer that TCS bought in 1974, it paid a tariff of 101.25%, including import duty, auxiliary duty, countervailing duty and a levy to help pay for the war in Bangladesh.

One of Mr Ramadorai’s colleagues, Jayant Pendharkar, now TCS’s chief marketing officer, remembers the computer arriving in three truckloads, under government seal awaiting a customs inspection. The next morning, he was horrified to discover that an overenthusiastic employee had broken the seal and unpacked the computer before the inspectors arrived. Showing an admirable talent for improvisation, Mr Ramadorai salvaged the sealing wires from the bin, threaded them back into place and refastened them with a twist. The customs officials were none the wiser.

The government required TCS to earn twice as much from exports as it spent on its imported machines. Thus before the internet, the fax machine or direct-dial phone connections, it pioneered “offshoring”. It won its first foreign contracts with the help of the Burroughs corporation, then the number two computer-maker, which sold its machines in India through TCS. Seturaman Mahalingam, now TCS’s chief financial officer, worked on an early offshore project in Feltham, outside London. He remembers sending his instructions to the Mumbai programmers by post, mailing two copies, one day apart. That way if one postbag was lost, the duplicate would still reach its destination.

These daunting, early years taught Mr Ramadorai and his co-workers frugality and rigour. Programmers had to book half-hour slots on the Burroughs terminals, working with their colleagues breathing down their neck. One hour’s computer time cost more than a programmer earned in a month. A call from London to Mumbai would be interrupted every few minutes by the operator, checking that you wanted to keep talking.”

Really Hats off to these people. This was the foundation of IT Industry in India.