Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (22 page)

moving outside corporate boundaries

Mark Kahn joined Godrej Agrovet, our agribusiness company, in 2007, as part of a turnaround team. In late 2010, Mark proposed that we
launch India’s first agricultural technology, or agtech, venture fund with Godrej the anchor investor. Mark named the fund Omnivore Partners, after Michael Pollan’s 2006 bestseller on food policy,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
.

Agriculture accounts for 14 percent of India’s GDP but employs 53 percent of the nation’s labor force. As those disparate ratios suggest, India lags far behind global averages and emerging market competitors in agricultural productivity. Mark argued the best way to address India’s agricultural challenges was by funding young Indian entrepreneurs seeking to create products and solutions to revolutionize agriculture. By supporting agricultural start-ups, Omnivore Partners aims to catalyze the development of a nationwide agtech entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Thus far, Omnivore has raised $50 million and is currently supporting five entrepreneurs and start-ups working on agtech products and services across India. Godrej has more than just a financial stake in Omnivore; we also provide significant advisory support to the fund. The Omnivore team is backing start-ups in areas such as weather forecasting, agricultural mechanization, farm automation, agribusiness IT, and livestock processing. Our portfolio thus far includes businesses headquartered in Rajkot, Guwahati, Mangalore, Delhi, and Bangalore.

Omnivore forced us to confront whether Godrej should support entrepreneurship beyond our corporate boundaries. Ultimately, we decided that it did not matter where disruptive innovation took place, as long as Godrej could play a part in it.

blurring the boundaries of culture, academia, and business

Sometimes a modern
antevasin
must straddle more than one boundary. The Godrej India Culture Lab is an experimental space started on our corporate campus two years ago to cross-pollinate the best minds in
India with leading global thinkers. The Culture Lab is the brainchild of an
antevasin
in his own right: Parmesh Shahani, an MIT-educated TED fellow who had worked as a technology entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, and a fashion magazine editor.

The Culture Lab connects academia, the corporate world, creative industries, nongovernmental organizations, and the public sector. It hosts activities under different formats, including conferences on themes such as urbanization, lectures featuring visiting global academics such as the Japanese designer Kenya Hara of Muji and the world-renowned architect Tadao Ando, as well as plays, music performances, and even a one-day pop-up museum.

Through initiatives like the Culture Lab, we’re trying to reimagine the role of a company in society. We recognize that modern global corporations have broad responsibilities that extend beyond the interests of shareholders or a handful of charitable causes and philanthropic actions. Godrej’s multifaceted relations with the cultural, intellectual, and corporate worlds are part of our efforts to create a modern successful but also socially and culturally relevant company.

finding our next
antevasins

To find and hire the experienced, multitalented, creative people needed to reinvent a modern company, we’re reimagining the way we look for the next generation of
antevasins.
The good news is that today’s young Indians have begun to look at life holistically, moving beyond the singular career focus that drove their parents and older siblings. We decided to incorporate this trend into our campus talent recruitment process, with Godrej LOUD.

LOUD threw out the rule book for hiring summer interns, replacing it with a single criterion—how compelling the deepest desire or goal of the candidate was. LOUD stands for “Live Out Ur Dreams” (forgive the SMS lingo), and it was launched as an online contest across eight Indian business schools. Winning entries
received funding from Godrej to make their dreams into reality and were invited to join the Godrej Group’s summer internship program.

Godrej LOUD received thousands of “likes” on Facebook and substantial press coverage. Fifteen finalists were short-listed from 422 applications, and ultimately seven dreams were selected for funding, including a painting holiday in Spain and the digging of a well in a small Indian village. By blurring the lines between employer and benefactor, Godrej is gaining recognition as a place that values young talented people not just for the work they do for Godrej but also for their creativity, their ability to dream and find ways to transform those dreams into real achievements.

looking into the future

These are four of many ways Godrej is seeking to straddle the border between old and new. We have embraced the idea that to succeed in an ever younger, ever more globalized country like India, we must always be ready to undertake radical experiments and innovations that transcend the boundaries we all accepted only a decade ago.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is executive chairman of Google and coauthor of
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business.

In spite of its well-deserved reputation as one of the world’s leading information technology and software development hubs, India is far from being the connected society many foreigners imagine. In 2004, when Google set up its first R&D center outside the United States in Bangalore, we were surprised to discover that one of our biggest challenges was Internet connectivity. Our ability to transmit data between India and our facilities around the world was extremely limited, an obstacle that, given the nature of our business, we had to surmount quickly.

Much of the connectivity developed in India over the past twenty years is the result of large domestic and international companies doing just what we did—figuring out how to develop their own private networks to work with subsidiaries and clients. So far, though, those efforts have yielded relatively few connectivity benefits for the Indian population as a whole.

Today India, with a population of 1.2 billion people, has more than 600 million mobile-phone users but only about 150 million people who regularly connect to the Internet. In 2011, India’s Internet penetration rate (the percentage of the population using the Internet) was 11 percent, according to the International Telecommunication Union. That’s far below that of developed nations, where penetration rates average 70 percent, and less than a third of China’s
penetration ratio of 38 percent. It’s also less than half penetration rates for all developing countries, which average 24 percent. The number of India’s broadband users, twenty million, is even smaller. By any reasonable definition, India is an Internet laggard. To me, the Internet in India today feels a little like where it was in America in about 1994—four years before Google was even born.

The good news is that there’s tremendous potential for increased Internet penetration to have a positive impact on India’s economy and society. India is on the cusp of a connectivity revolution. I believe India has the chance to leapfrog its current connectivity challenges, bring Internet access to a majority of its citizens—and even raise its penetration ratio to 60 or 70 percent within the next five to ten years. Connecting its next five hundred million will make India the largest open-access Internet market in the world. In ten years’ time, I predict it will be almost impossible for any child in India to imagine what life was like before the Internet. But to realize that promise, India must make the right technology choices.

One key choice will be how and how quickly India builds out the fixed-line networks in its cities and towns. Fiber-optic cables are, by far, the best way to promote higher connectivity. You want to bury them underground in every place you can: every road, every path, every ditch, every piece of land. Fiber-optic cables with optical amplifiers will last thirty, even forty years and will scale to almost infinite bandwidth. Each fiber-optic cable will carry all the data that’s around us in the air today and much more with some fairly straightforward techniques involving wavelengths. For cities and towns, fiber-optic cable extends Internet coverage much faster and at a much lower cost than trying to provide connectivity to everyone the old-fashioned way by cable or phone line.

A second area to get right is cellular technology. India should make the transition from 2G and 3G to 4G technology as quickly as possible because 4G makes far more efficient use of the spectrum and users
can get so much more bandwidth out of it. It may take time for India to achieve these two goals because its telecommunications industry is undercapitalized and has a lot of debt. But I am confident that eventually the transformation will happen.

Investing in a bigger, faster telecommunications network will have a big payoff for India as that network combines with one of the most radically life-altering developments of the last decade: the emergence of moderately priced mobile devices. These days, it’s common for people in developing countries who don’t have televisions, refrigerators, or even indoor plumbing to have mobile phones. And even those who don’t own a phone themselves almost always know someone in their village who does. Now imagine what the world will be like when not only phones with voice and text capability are cheap and ubiquitous, but so are mobile devices that can connect to and navigate around the Internet. There’s every reason to believe in the next five years, we’ll see the emergence of smartphones with a moderately powerful screen at a cost well below $50—a huge breakthrough. True, Internet access speeds for those phones will be modest compared to more expensive devices in places like the United States. But as has been demonstrated repeatedly around the world, as cell-phone usage spreads, access to advanced information technology can be life changing. Suddenly, all kinds of new things are possible.

In India, this phenomenon is sure to unleash a customer-driven revolution on a scale we’ve never seen before—in education, financial services, health care, entertainment, and almost every conceivable aspect of life. In education alone, the possibilities are staggering: Parents who believe their children are not getting proper instruction in local schools will be able to use mobile phones or tablets to help fulfill their kids’ educational needs. Great teachers can connect to children in remote villages. Indian students can watch Ivy League professors on YouTube or share knowledge and ideas by video chat with experts or other students thousands of kilometers away.

Similar changes are in store for banking and financial services. India has a huge number of people whose banking needs are underserved.
The government’s Unique Identification project, led by my friend Nandan Nilekani, is creating enormous new possibilities for e-commerce. Already, we’re seeing the emergence of many new start-ups created to help middle- and lower-income consumers move money around, and because of the sheer scale of the market in India, these new businesses are likely to be highly profitable.

I see the creative potential of India’s people all around me in Silicon Valley, where India-born entrepreneurs account for 40 percent of start-ups. Just think what will happen when India’s entrepreneurial innovators are able to create great global companies without leaving their country. They’ll change the world.

Hundreds of large firms focused on the Internet will be founded and will succeed by focusing purely on Indian consumers, Indian taste, Indian style, Indian sports. Can one of those companies ultimately become the next Google? Of course. That may not happen for quite a few years. But if India plays its cards right, we’ll soon see Indian engineers and small businesses tackling Indian problems first, then exporting the solutions that work best.

The other potentially game-changing impact of the democratizing Internet access is on governance. It’s no secret that India is plagued by corruption, which impedes the country’s economic progress, frustrates ordinary people’s efforts to advance themselves, and seriously infringes on individuals’ rights to fair treatment by the authorities. One of the Internet’s great virtues is that it empowers individuals and groups to expose the excesses and abuses of those in positions of power. It can shine a light on human behavior to allow—or force—society to curb the abuses, especially against those least able to defend themselves. As the Internet penetrates India, we’ll see dramatic improvement in, for example, the status of women, access to education, and the transparency in public life necessary to improve governance and attack corruption. All of those are necessary preconditions to the economic and commercial success that India’s remarkably talented people deserve.

Because India’s next five hundred million Internet users aren’t connected
yet, we don’t hear much from them now; we don’t know who they are, what they want, or what they’ll want to say. What we do know is that they will be a very different group from the first one hundred million connected Indians. We know they’ll be far more diverse, in income, lifestyle, education levels, and their languages (which I see as a big opportunity for Google Translate). And we know we’re about to hear from them in a very big way.

All of that potential, however, hinges on an even more fundamental choice: Will India embrace an open network or a closed one? The political impulse to try to shield people from inflammatory, obscene, or defamatory commentary and images in a country as diverse and often fractious as India is understandable but misplaced. At Google we believe that, in fact, the freer a country’s Internet, the better chance that country has of exposing deep-rooted problems and confronting them honestly.

India’s ambivalence about Internet freedom often surprises those who don’t live, travel, or do business there. Other countries, like China, are far more famous for exerting command and control over cyberspace. India, on the other hand, is known for its freewheeling democracy and boisterous political debate. But a Google search of “India Internet censorship” generates thousands of hits documenting episodes in recent years of government authorities, both at the national and state levels, demanding the closure of websites or dispatching law enforcement officials to intimidate people for posted material deemed to be objectionable.