India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

To explain the rise of the software sector one must invoke factors both proximate and distant. Success, said John F. Kennedy, has many fathers. In this particular case, however, all the claimants had truth on their side. Some credit was certainly due to the reforms of 1991, which opened up the foreign market for the first time. But some credit also accrued to Rajiv Gandhi’s government, which gave special emphasis to the then very nascent electronics and telecommunications industries. Moving back a decade further, the Janata government’s expulsion of IBM allowed the development of an indigenous computer manufacturing and maintenance industry. But perhaps the story should really begin with Jawaharlal Nehru’s government, which had the foresight to set up a chain of high-quality engineering schools, and the wisdom to retain English as the language of higher education and of inter-state and inter-national communication.