Harish Mehta is a COEP alumnus, Electrical 1972 batch. He went to the US to do his MS in Control Systems. His room partner, a Sardarji who had done his BS from the US, was doing his MS in Computer Science. He brainwashed Harish into dropping out of Control Systems and getting into Computer Science. Harish did that – but had major problems getting a job. He finally found one with Traveller’s Insurance in their EDP department. Was disappointed at not getting in to the likes of IBM, but nevertheless worked hard – and was rewarded with a fast tracked career. In the meantime, green card and marriage happened. The Mehta family was not very comfortable with US culture, and so in 1976, much to the dismay of their friends in the US and India, decided to return home. Those were the years of the emergency, not exactly the right environment to come back.
Harish’s dad and father-in-law were both in business. But film distribution and auto parts manufacturing did not attract young Harish too much. He wanted to do something in his field. So he ended up becoming a sales partner for Hinditron. Those were the days when mini computers cost lakhs of Rupees – and were difficult to sell. So Harish decided to branch out into renting computer time. His company imported a PDP 11– taking a forex loan of Rs. 13 lakh from ICICI to do that. And suddenly found that things were not working out as per his plan. One problem was a sudden depreciation of the Rupee – they ended up paying more than Rs. 30 lakh for the loan. Another was that the machine that they imported was good for scientific applications, but did not perform as well when it came to commercial applications. It did not have even basic stuff like COBOL compilers and batch processing facilities.
Another lateral thinking idea was to then see if they could modify the OS to see if the commerce stuff could be added. Also if they could end up making their own DBMS. This was the time that Oracle had just started selling its Relational DBMS. Harish started work on Gemini, a network DBMS. A few IIT Madras engineers were hired, and spent 2 years working on the DBMS. The experiment failed, but it made Harish aware of opportunities outside of hardware. With domestic clients for his machine limited, he decided to look out for work from clients outside India. He was earning $ 22,000 per year managing databases at Traveller’s Insurance. For 1/15th of the cost, he could do the same out of India. And that was the genesis of the Indian IT services industry. By 1986, Onward Technologies, Harish’s IT services company, was already deploying more than 300 resource persons for IT exports.
Harish agrees that the reason IT flourished in India was because of the ignorance of the government. But even then the bureaucracy shackled this intangible based industry with a lot of rules which were designed for tangibles. Harish in the meantime had got into a JV with Digital Corporation, to manufacture their machines and its software in India. The hardware biggies at that time, HCL and Wipro, managed through their contacts in the government, to delay Digital’s entry by more than 2 years. Harish realised that dealing with the government at an industry level was better than dealing with it at the company level. There were organisations like MAIT in existence, but they were very hardware focussed. The hardware guys were quite happy with the ignorance of the government, which enabled them to pay customs duties on the cost of the floppy instead of the software. This accounting of software at zero cost was a major hurdle to the development of the software industry. It took a lot of effort on part of the nascent software industry to convince the government that IT is an animal of a different species. One of the things that helped do this lobbying was NASSCOM, of which Harish is a founder member. Initially TCS, which has historically been the elephant in the IT industry room, was not too keen to come onboard, but some sweet talking by Harish with FC Kohli managed to convince them. Kohli himself did not join, but he deputed one of the senior team members at TCS, Nirmal Jain, to attend.
In the nineties, Harish got into a joint venture with Novel Networks. This got him in touch with Kanwal Rekhi. Kanwal’s critique of the Indian IT industry has always been that there has never been a product focus. With the coming of the dot com boom in the late nineties, some of the IT guys in India realized that there could be big bucks happening in products. In order to encourage entrepreneurship in the product space, they got together to get TiE to India. Harish helped start the Mumbai chapter, Nandan Nilekani was founder member of the Bangalore Chapter and Saurabh founded the Delhi chapter.
We had a very interesting Q n A session at the end. One of the observations by an audience member, who runs a company called Fulcrum out of NY, was the culture of servilience that pervades the Indian IT engineer, no matter which part of the globe he is in. He called it the order-takin-culture. To this another member of the audience reacted that it was because of our background in services. We have always treated our customer as king, and rarely have we questioned what they have to say. Being in the services always means that you play second fiddle to the mainstream guys. What makes the situation worse is a spineless middle management. Another cultural factor is our current education system, which fosters competition more than cooperation.
Anand Khandekar, one of the pioneers in the quality movement in Indian IT, had some interesting recommendations to share. He felt that we need better math students for India to flourish in areas like AI and IoT which will dominate the future. He also felt that we need to have non US, UK country tie-ups in order to inculcate the right culture in Indian IT. He identified Israel, with its security background; Vietnam, which is producing good math students skilled in algorithms; and Estonia, which is doing good work in AI – as three countries to focus on.
Harish is on the Board of Governors at COEP, thanks to FC Kohli. I asked him about what he felt about COEP’s progress. He feels that the college is now at par with the IITs. There are 70 PhDs, and more on the way, in the teaching team. He lamented the government control, and felt that it would end only when the college is given deemed university status.