One often hears the criticism that leading edge technology is irrelevant for the majority of the population; particularly in countries like India, with a large population living below poverty line, any major initiative in high-tech is viewed with suspicion, if not downright condemnation. It is definitely true that an economically poor nation such as India has to address with utmost urgency, the key issues of food distribution, providing shelter & clothing, access to sanitation and drinking water, before talking about Science & Technology. Research & Development might appear as “luxury items”, which poor countries can afford to live without.  

It might be worthwhile to ponder over some of the examples where “leading edge technology” has in fact benefited the millions, many of them economically poor.  

·         The “green revolution” pioneered by the Scientist-Politician combine MS Swaminathan - C Subramanian is a classic example. When the world predicted in sixties that millions of Indians would die of food starvation in eighties, thanks to high-tech – “genetically engineered” high-yielding rice & wheat varieties, cross-breeding of milch cows using “artificial insemination” or better preservation of seeds through “controlled radiation” – we have today enough to feed billion Indians  - grains, fruits & vegetables. (We do have distribution problems, which we will address later). 

·         Another notable success is the “white revolution” pioneered by Verghese Kurien; starting with Gujarat Co-operatives, the “Amul” experiment used “high-tech principles of organization”, “high-tech storage & processing” of milk and “high-tech marketing” of Amul brand and Amul products that the average milk consumption in India has increased 10-fold over the past 20 years. Today Amul is the brand with most recall value, surpassing many MNC brand names.  

·         Another Politician-Scientist combine Jawaharlal Nehru-Homi Bhabha, led to the nuclear power capability for India, which in turn led to part of the growth of our electrical utility industry; and a whole range of skills that include “radiation” for seeds, “new materials” for our army men in high attitude, “stainless steel fabrication technology” for household vessels and project management capability that is used by companies like L & T to execute highway projects & high-rise housing projects that are used by millions of common men & women.  

·         Another combine Indira Gandhi – Vikram Sarabhai led to satellite technology & space exploration that in turn led to the “wiring of the homes” – satellite TV reaches 90% of Indians including the most remote villages in India – and “disaster warning” – for tidal waves, tornadoes and other natural calamities, particularly in coastal India. 

·         Yet another duo Rajiv Gandhi – Sam Pitroda, pioneered the Public Call Office (PCO) concept that has revolutionized “village telephony” – thanks to the development of “rugged rural telephone exchanges” and a simple model of “shared services” that can reach millions. 

In a sense, “high-tech” can address the needs of common man and deliver benefits that make a difference to their lives, as some of the examples quoted above demonstrate. Of course we have not been able to sustain this spirit in many other cases; many of our R & D in national laboratories and institutions are either for “fashion” or “earn my bread” research; hopefully, our researchers will get a dose of “enthusiasm”, get “freed” from bureaucracy and political interference, get out of mediocrity and start pursuing “world-class” research. 

 MIT the Institution 

MIT is a brand that immediately rings a bell in the minds of millions of Indians – students, teachers, researchers, policy planners, officials, politicians and leaders across a whole spectrum of human activities. Founded way back in 1861, MIT has contributed a lot to Science, Technology, Management, and more importantly through the synergy of technology to many other areas of human endeavour.  

 

Legendary names like Claude Shannon (Information Theory), Marvin Minsky (Artificial Intelligence), Noam Chomsky (Linguistics), Paul Samuelson (Economics), Har Gobind Khorana (Biology) are associated with MIT faculty. Research done at MIT has contributed to Vitamin A extraction, artificial limbs, magnetic core memory for modern digital computer, numerically controlled machines and high-speed photography. In computing alone, there have been any number of things that have an MIT hand behind it - LISP and Scheme programming languages, early operating systems, X Windows user interface, time shared computing, symbolic computing etc., More recently, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is hosted at MIT with the key hand behind “http” and “WWW”, Tim Barnes Lee heading the Consortium; over the past seven years most of the key standards that govern WWW have come out of W3C – HTML, XML and SOAP, to name a few.  

MIT always encouraged entrepreneurship – many companies on “Route 128” (with a cluster of high-tech companies including Digital Equipment, Thinking Machines Inc. and Lotus Corporation) had an MIT connection. Akamai Technologies recently came out of research done by a Master’s student at MIT. There were a number of Indian connections too – IIT Kanpur, BITS Pilani & IIM Calcutta had significant help from MIT in their early days. MIT had some outstanding alumni of Indian origin – Amar Bose (of Bose Speaker fame) and many influential individuals behind some of the largest industrial houses in India – Tatas, Birlas, & Godrej, to name a few. More recently Gururaj Deshpande endowed a 20 million dollar fellowship at MIT. 

Media Lab – the Lab unusual

Among the many laboratories at MIT, Media Lab is special in many ways. Started in 1985, through the visionary efforts of Professor Jereme Weisner (former President of MIT) and headed by the high profile “IT guru” Professor Nicholas Negroponte (author of the best-selling book “Being Digital”), Media lab is funded primarily through corporate funding (as opposed to Government funding that dominates research funding in most other research labs at MIT and other Research institutions). Media Lab is very interdisciplinary - with computer scientists, electrical engineers, materials scientists, mathematicians, sociologists, architects, musicologists and economists - working together. With 35 million dollars of annual budget, out of which 33 millions come from private sector, Media Lab has made unusual contributions - wearable computers, electronic ink, nanotechnology, alternate ways to produce computer chips, intelligent toys, agents that can do unusual personal tasks, new form of computing paradigms like “affective computing” etc., to name a few. Many of them have led to commercial products of considerable fame – MP3 music, e-Ink etc. The famous project “Things That Think” that has been documented in the book by Neil Gershenfeld challenges many of our contemporary views of computers and computing devices. Encouraged by the success of Media Labs, many large companies in high tech sector including Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Nokia, BT, Motorola, Acer, Panasonic and Ericsson have endowed large research grants at Media Lab. A second Media Lab was started in 1999 in Ireland. After scouting around many countries in Asia, Media Lab decided to locate their third lab, Media Lab Asia (MLA) in India; it was formally commissioned in June 2001.   

Media Lab Asia – the project with a promise

Media Lab Asia is truly an ambitious project. With an expected budget of over Rs 4000 crores, over the next 10 years it is the first “Billion Dollar” project ever visualized in independent India. It enjoys considerable support at the highest levels in Government; with the energetic IT Minister Shri Pramod Mahajan taking personal interest to make it a success and getting the headquarters located in his constituency in Maharashtra State (Mumbai - Pune). MLA is likely to be larger than the two earlier labs in USA & Europe. Though located at Mumbai, MLA promises to follow a distributed model with satellite activity centers at Delhi, Kanpur & Chennai.  

 There are many developments in India over the past few years that indicate a possible success for MLA in India.  

The unusual cable TV revolution (that brought more than 40 million Indian households within its reach in less than 40 months and dozens of cable TV channels) has led to an information explosion across the nook and corner of the country and brought global ideas, perspectives and views to the doorsteps of the common man, even in the country side. The parallel development of globalisation, the fall of USSR, the unification of East and West Germany, the miracle called Asian tigers, the importance of European unity, the arrival of Euro currency and Asian consolidation (ASEAN), WTO regime & its implications, along with the arrival of every possible Chinese goods at remarkably low prices have caught the attention of an average Indian more stunningly than the budget speeches of Finance Ministers, writings of economists and lectures of Business Schools professors. The role models for youngsters in India are more likely to be Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji; in turn, it has installed a “can do” attitude in the minds of an average youngster in India. The rampant corruption in India which led to the interference and ultimate demise of many public sector enterprises and the emergence of new generation private sector enterprises have led to the general acceptance of private sector participation in major activities. With the arrival of the competition in airlines, courier service, telecom, transportation, automobile, steel, communications, entertainment, white goods and textiles, an average Indian has tasted better products at more affordable prices. All these developments have led to a more positive attitude towards, technology in general and IT in particular. In the recent years many individuals and corporations have taken bold initiatives to work with the Government to address some of the core issues that confront Indian society- poverty, illiteracy, lack of access to water, clean environment etc. Premji Foundation wanting to get millions of elementary school children back to school, Infosys Foundation creating libraries in hundreds of village schools, BV Jagadeesh & Chandrasekar (of Exodus) planning to invest millions of dollars to improve Government schools in Karnataka are some of the developments in this arena. In this backdrop MLA has a better chance of success.