Indian Yankee in King Gates' court-Meet the modern day Nizam of Cyberbad.
JPR:
Here is an interesting article on Naidu Chief Minister of Andrah Pradesh and his efforts to turn his state into to a high tech haven.
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Excerpts from Business Standard.
An Indian Yankee in King Gates's Court
Chandra Babu Naidu goes barnstorming across the United States, selling an unlikely dream: Andhra Pradesh, T N Ninan, who accompanied the delegation, has the details
He makes no concessions to America's business elite. No regulation dark suit, and certainly no tie; and no clean shave. Instead, without a trace of self-consciousness, he wears black shoes with white socks; a loosely-styled raw silk shirt with open collar; and cream-coloured trousers. And of course the trade mark stubble, an untidy pepper and salt. This isn't someone who's had a make-over. But confident about himself, he makes his pitch.
His accent couldn't be easy to follow if you're used to American twang or drawl. Many of his allusions escape his audiences. And his over-used audio-visual presentation on Andhra Pradesh makes some odd claims. “The people here use their heads,” says one slide as you see kites flying on the screen.
Another gets a metaphor wrong when it talks of the state having one “leg” in the past and another “leg” in the future.But none of it matters. Chandra Babu Naidu communicates, and very effectively indeed. On a barnstorming tour of the United States in late September — coast to coast, as they say — the 48-year-old chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and head honcho of the Telugu Desam party, talked the language that no other Indian politician does.
“I want world-class infrastructure,” he declares to small but attentive audiences. “I will end illiteracy in 10 years, if not less,” he promises (more than half the state's 70 million people can't read or write today).
“I will build an airport that rivals (hold your breath) Singapore and Dubai.” Ecstatic NRIs in the audiences stand up to ask: Why aren't you prime minister?
Is this man serious? You bet. For while the acolytes have renamed Hyderabad as Cyberabad in an excess of zeal that matches the more delighted NRIs, and the critics have dubbed him the Nizam of Hyperabad (one observer argued in this paper last week that the state government was bankrupt), Naidu is trying hard to build credibility: See what I have done in the last three years, he says in effect, and then come invest in the state.
So what has he done, and what is he promising? The answers will tell whether Naidu is to be taken seriously, and whether he will in fact use another five years (the state goes to the polls late next year) to transform Andhra Pradesh into something unrecognisable today.
So here's Naidu's list: Twice as much power capacity created in the last two years compared to any other state; by far the most efficient use of existing capacity (82 per cent, against the national average of 64 per cent); the decision by the Indian School of Business (to be run by Wharton and Kellogg) to locate outside Hyderabad, next to the Indian Institute of Information Technology that is already functioning, and not too far from the Hi-tech city that Larsen & Toubro has built in partnership with the state government: 5 million square feet of space constructed to international specifications in barely a year.
Naidu boasts that he has already sold 70 per cent of the space in Hi-tech city, much better than the rival, older technology park in Bangalore built by Tatas in partnership with Singapore.
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He says things have changed, even declaring: “Now the money is there. We have to find ways to spend it.”That is over-stating the case. But with people like World Bank President James Wolfensohn seemingly in love with Naidu, it may well be true that money is not a constraint.
Naidu's problem is that his computer-friendly image has gone ahead of him, so (perhaps remembering Rajiv Gandhi), many people don't take him too seriously. But as you listen to him, it quickly becomes clear that Naidu is focusing on much more than information technology.
“I want to increase per capita income seven-fold by 2020,” Naidu dreams, citing some numbers crunched for him by the ubiquitous McKinsey; “And Andhra Pradesh will have twice the national per capita income by then ”— something that no state has ever been able to achieve.
How is he going to get there? He spells that out easily enough: “The basis for growth will be world class infrastructure, human resource development and better governance. And there is no substitute for hard work.”
He has begun by seeking to provide the core infrastructure on a scale that no one else has conceived. A dozen ports are going to be privatised, he says; three are already in process. And Krishnapatnam (heard of it?) will be developed as an alternative to Chennai port.
Power generation capacity will be more than doubled in five years, Naidu says, taking the total from 7,000 MW to more than 15,000 MW. There is no power shortage even today, he declares.
Roads: plans for a coastal express highway, and 1,500 km of toll roads. The coastal road corridor, helped by the abundance of port capacity, will lead to enormous industrial investment, Naidu hopes.
Two all-new international airports (the second will be at Vishakhapatnam), for which land is being acquired. International bids are about to be invited for Hyderabad airport, he says. But how on earth does he think he can match Changi or Dubai? Naidu is dismissive. "What do they have? If they can do it, we can too. What you need is the vision. The trick is to become a transit hub.”
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Simultaneously, Naidu wants to develop the social infrastructure getting quickly to 100 per cent literacy (from an abysmal 44 per cent today), and arresting population growth. He is willing to focus on unfashionable issues, even when making his presentation to serried ranks of blue suits, and talks of promoting self-help groups of farmers who will manage the use of irrigation water.
His outline of a plan to change the way the government functions, evokes a more enthusiastic response: he will reduce the levels that a file travels before a decision is taken, from 11 to 3; reduce the scope for discretionary decision-making in order to curb corruption; go for more open government, using information technology; conduct training courses for ministers and bureaucrats (shades of Rajiv Gandhi again); and force contractors on government projects to be accountable to the people for whom the projects are meant, by making the contract details public. Indeed, Naidu surprises by even talking of citizen's charters and social contracts.
Old-time Hyderabadis scoff, arguing that the reality of Naidu's decision-making is quite different from the myths he doles out. But they seem curiously unaware of the scope of his effort, and the scale of the vision that he articulates, not to speak of the long hours he puts in. Repeatedly in the US, audiences were caught up by his communication of not just vision but also focus, commitment, and energy.
After meeting Bill Gates in Seattle in search of a promise that Microsoft's development centre in Hyderabad will employ at least a thousand professionals, and doing a quick tour of Seattle port (which is part of a consortium involved in Kakinada port's development), Naidu is on a red-eye flight across the continent, to Boston. Short of sleep (the time zone has moved three hours forward), he checks into his hotel at 7.15; by 8.00 he is off for breakfast with the city's business community. That's the start of a 14-hour day.
In New York, he hires a helicopter to save time as he hops to New Jersey and back. On other occasions he skips a meal to keep moving, and grabs a bite when he can. He reached a dinner in his honour 75 minutes late. But people seem willing to forgive. And at every meeting, he invites his listener(s) to come to Hyderabad — which he says will become an intelligent city with electronic boards at every major junction. It strains credulity, but he seems serious. “It's difficult to bring about change,” he concedes, “but once the process begins, you get a multiplier effect.”
He wants IBM to set up an institute for electronic government; and General Electric to house some of its data entry/software business in the state, apart from getting involved in power projects; and Wolfensohn to finance distance education; and Boeing to locate some of its software work in Andhra Pradesh. The theme is repeated: Hyderabad has to become a hub, a knowledge hub, a transport hub....
He doesn't let the grass grow under his feet. On a visit to Lucent's research centre, he discussed his plans for a 2 megabyte fibre-optic backbone as an information highway across the state— a first in India, and therefore pathbreaking in a way. But Lucent brought him into the very late 20th century. “
No one looks at megabytes today; people don't even look at gigabytes; what people now invest in is terrabytes of capacity (each terrabyte is equal to a million megabytes).
Naidu listens, absorbs the numbers on costs, asks a couple of questions and moves away. He knows that 2 MB is the most that the department of telecom in Delhi will allow. But that doesn't faze him. The next day he has despatched the head of his newly created IT department back to New Jersey: Go back to Lucent, let us look at terrabytes, Naidu says.
R Chandrashekhar, who is suddenly asked to shift from country road to autobahn, says the cost increase won't be much. The plan is to use the existing network of power transmission towers, thereby avoiding underground cabling. Lucent says the power lines won't interfere with the wide area network. And the cost increase in scaling up to terrabytes is suddenly nothing at all.
If these grand plans fructify, the state will certainly be transformed: abundant power, an excellent roadwork, good communication networks, transport linkages, an educated and trained workforce. With its central location in the Deccan, and a state population of 70 million, a hinterland is assured. What he needs is investment, from the rest of the world.
Naidu has been quite clever about this by linking up with the Indian organisation that is best connected to global business, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). His US tour was set up with CII's help, and indeed a CII delegation of CEOs (including this writer as an accompanying guest) travelled with Naidu and helped set up meetings, impart some gravitas to the group sessions, and indirectly sell India.
Naidu is seizing the opportunity to present the state as something other than a backwater: 20 per cent of all proposed investment in India is in Andhra Pradesh, he says; and 23 per cent of the country's software professionals are there. And he makes it easy to move in. Application forms on the internet; clearance to Oracle within three hours of application — the folklore grows. And Naidu keeps presenting, cajoling, inviting. “I have learnt it from Clinton,” he says. “To keep communicating and motivating.”
At the meeting with Dow Jones, the publishing company sought to show off its electronic wares, only to pull up data from India that was a couple of weeks old. “I can do better than that,” Naidu chirped up, and asked an accompanying official, Randeep Sudan, to show Dow Jones staff the state government's website. Sudan was on to it quickly, and served up data that had Dow Jones' managers gawking at the water level in every state reservoir, updated as of that morning.
Naidu enjoyed that little triumph. But he will need much larger ones if the vision that he spelt out to two dozen audiences in the US is to become some kind of reality. But this much is already clear: Chandra Babu Naidu has the ability to engage the attention of the people who can help him achieve the results he seeks. And if he can build on his initial successes, he might well have as long a queue of investors in Andhra Pradesh as Guangdong.
business-standard.com |
