A question that has dwelled in my minds for long is "Are we innovative enough?" To add to the question, are we enterprising enough? I hate to compare ourselves with other countries, but I have always asked as to why we do not have popular software in any of the Indian languages. Is it because we have not bothered to design the interface, or we are just plain happy as it is with our illiteracy?
Major leading companies in our IT industry are mostly doing contractual or outsourced jobs. A single employee has to be paid a handsome salary of USD 4000 in the IT industry outside India. A BPO hires 4 people in the same salary. Everybody is happy, more work done, less money spent. Well, almost because we hear some indians being beaten up. Why are we happy doing other's jobs and bearing jeers and insults from them?
Imagine an institute like IIT. Isn't there a huge difference between the environment outside and inside? Are the students really aware of the problems happening in the city? No, I am not talking about political problems. I mean problems that THEIR discipline can handle. A civil engineering student or a group of them could easily plan better roads, mechanical engineers could design better engines to control pollution. But are we doing so? Some people say that most of the technology that is obsolete abroad, is imported to India. Are we proud of such a situation? Are we educating and making students who are more interested in making money than serving the country?
In a recent industry-student meet, people from the industry complained that faculty from the popular educational institutes do not give them enough support, and they have to spend a 100 times more to buy the machines from abroad. The faculty in turn say that the problems are not challenging enough for them to handle. The student is missing in the picture as he is too busy either with institute festivals or heavy course curricula.
In case a student comes up with an idea, the response is "Hey look! Your idea is too vague!" or "I do not think this should be done! Where is the research in it?". Two to three years later, somebody else does the same thing. The response is ...
Perhaps, we set our targets too high. People love thinking big. Let us come up with small but concrete ideas. Crisp! All problems do not have to be too complicated. All problems do not have to be multi-disciplinary. Think of small problems. Maybe, we would integrate them later into a bigger solution. In order to come up with our own ideas, we have to learn our concepts well. It is not enough to know the difference between a shapefile and a coverage.
As I had mentioned in my previous blog about the concept of "brain drain". Are we creating situations for brain drain ourselves, or are we going to do something about it?
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