Y2K: The Watershed Year for Indian IT Industry

In the world of Information Technology India's name is taken with respect. What is the reason of India's sudden rise to prominence? This is a country which is way behind in many human development indices, a country whose English speaking population is around two percent and per capita income is about USD 1000 and it is so far away from the West, especially the US.

Let us try to examine the reason for this phenomenon.

Maybe this is because India is the source of so called Arabian numbers. Zero came from India, and a binary number is the combination of zero and one, and a byte in made up of binary numbers. But this is not reason enough, Indians' legendary facility with mathematics and numbers notwithstanding.?

The reason may lies elsewhere. In the mid eighties Texas Instruments established a facility in India through satellite uplink. Here software people worked in India for Indian wages and exported software without actually being present on-site. The success of this venture drew the attention of other American corporations and India began to engage with America in IT.?

TI was the first multinational to establish a software design centre in India and was the first to install and use a satellite dish for exporting software.?

Over the period of time, the fame of good work done by the Indian techies spread to America, which was facing the actual threat of Y2K problem for both digital and non digital documentation and data storage which resulted from the practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits.

Before the dreaded year Y2K thousands of Indian cyber techies were hired to scan and rectify millions of lines of data.?

India had a trained English speaking workforce seeking respectable employment; their labour came cheap, and they were not coloured by any ideology, incendiary or otherwise, except for being gainfully employed and doing well for themselves in life. This largely ideologically neutral and secular workforce suited the West in general and the US in particular.?

This workforce toiled hard through the nineties, and smoothened the Y2K bug from the mountains of data. As the end of the millennium approached, the air was thick with anticipation and fear and some doomsayers predicted a D-Day scenario. People began stocking eatables. Some thought that on the fateful day the lifts will stop midway, water and electric supply will come to an abrupt halt, and data of health and insurance will be erased from the disc, and many other things, as year 2000 will be read as 1900 by the machines.

However, nothing of this kind happened, and the transition from 1999 to 2000 was smooth. People heaved a collective sigh of relief. This cusp was a coming of age, a rite of passage phenomenon for the Indian IT industry.?

It was this trust won by the Indians that made them so much reliable in the eyes of the American corporations, and the inflow of business has never stopped ever since. Therefore, this is an historical coincidence that the Indians were the right people at the right time to take the advantage of the opportunity that presented itself in the garb of crisis-as they often do-and the other overseas cyber communities cannot duplicate this success, ever.