Author: Manjeet Kripalani
Publication:
Date:
At first glance, losing MIT's Asian
Media Lab looks like a heavy blow. Chances are, however, that now India
will make its own advances
Indians beamed with pride last year
when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it had selected
the subcontinent as the home for its first Media Lab in Asia. Launching
this high-profile pilot project was a vote for India's brainpower over
other Asian nations. America's best technology brains from academia would
work with local talent to bridge the digital divide between the rich and
the poor.
Multinational companies, which supported
the MIT project in the U.S., would follow and invest in the India version,
too. The dream: India's Media Lab would be a showpiece for one of America's
most innovative learning institutions, something to replicate in other
parts of Asia as well as in Africa.
Alas, the dream collapsed in New
Delhi in early May. MIT announced it was withdrawing from the project,
following a private meeting between MIT professor/author Nicholas Negroponte
and Arun Shourie, India's new Information Technology & Communications
Minister.
ANOTHER BLUNDER? Afterward,
Shourie revealed that the Indian government hadn't renewed the partnership
contract in March. Negroponte pointed the finger at Shourie, blaming the
collapse on the fact fact that India has a new Minister for Technology
(the project had begun under the auspices of the previous Minister, who
was relieved of his job early this year). "The change carried a number
of unilateral decisions which made going forward impossible as a joint
venture," says Negroponte. The development was front-page news across the
country. Back in the States, even The New York Times lamented MIT's departure.
On the surface, it may look like
another blunder courtesy of India's hidebound governmental ways. But look
again. Behind the drama and accusations is a tale of unmet expectations
on both sides. What really transpired was that Indian projects never got
any outside funding, so new research went wanting. And MIT never could
pull in funding from multinationals -- or from Asia's own tech giants,
for that matter.
In fact, Media Labs Asia ran for
a year solely on the $13.5 million seed money provided by the Indian government,
with MIT contributing nothing yet calling the shots on the lab's project,
say insiders. Much of the money went toward paying the lab's staff, as
if they were international civil servants.
NO BIG HELP. As for the projects,
most of them existed before MIT came along, with work under way at the
highly regarded Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). Experiments in translation
of Indian languages, for instance, was being carried out at the IIIT, a
new information-technology institute in Hyderabad. New software projects
which work on the Simputer -- a cheap, handheld computer -- had already
begun in Bangalore, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of
Science. And Pravin Bhagwat, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology
at Kanpur and a former IBM and Bell Labs researcher, had pioneered work
on a rural Wi-Fi project.
Few MIT professors visited the labs
at any of IIT's branches, say students and professors at the institutions.
"MIT didn't add much value," says a source close to the project, adding
that the incident has taken some of the global techno-luster off the venerable
Bay State university.
MIT's plan of getting funding for
India was flawed from the get-go. Multinationals like Microsoft (MSFT),
Intel (INTC ), and Cisco (CSCO ) already have huge research and development
operations in India, so they likely saw little value in sponsoring other
research projects that don't relate directly to their businesses.
EARLY TROUBLE. Besides, IIT-Kanpur's
Bhagwat says few incentives exist for large multinationals to invest in
technologies for mass use in countries like India, since they aren't big
money-spinners. Such efforts, he says, will have to come from within India's
scientific research community, and Indian entrepreneurs will have to support
them with a winning business model that works for poor economies.
The first signs of trouble was the
cancelation of the MIT Media Labs Asia board meeting, scheduled for April
in New Delhi. MIT had planned the meeting around a demonstration of one
of its promising joint projects -- rural Wi-Fi telephony stretching across
25 kilometers in Uttar Pradesh, one of India's poorest states.
Shortly after the canceled meeting,
however, the IIT professors whose job it was to oversee the projects declared
that MIT added no value in research or in corporate sponsorships. And it
was revealed that MIT asked the Indian government to pay $1.7 million for
the use of the MIT name. That was perhaps the last straw.
SNATCHING VICTORY? For now,
Shourie's ministry retains the Media Labs Asia name. It has sacked the
staff and moved the shell project under its own auspices, to be run by
still-to-be-appointed ministry officials. That may not be the best idea,
given India's struggles with strangling bureaucracies.
And while Negroponte says Shourie
has "made some allegations which are preposterous and totally new," India's
tech community is standing behind Shourie, who's known for his extensive
experience and honesty. Last year, he donated $2.5 million in discretionary
funding he receives for serving in Parliament to build a biotech facility
at IIT-Kanpur. He thinks India can emerge as a global player in biotechnology.
"My respect for Shourie has increased enormously after this," says a senior
researcher at IIT-Kanpur.
India could still turn this bitter
breakup into a victory. MIT is discussing the establishment of another
Media Lab Asia with countries such as Singapore, Korea, and China. But
in India, the incident has refocused the country's attention on R&D,
and some Indians are hoping that it could encourage the establishment of
a domestic version of Bell Labs. It has also brought public attention to
the technological innovations done in small corners of India, like Wi-Fi
and geographic-information mapping systems that could greatly ease the
hard lives of rural Indians and help make administration of these areas
easier.
What's clear is that with little
or no support from multinationals, poor countries such as India will have
to develop suitable new technologies and innovatively adapt existing ones
to solve their own problems. That will put other nations on the path to
progress, too. Same mission as Media Labs, but with a more home-grown flavor.
(Kripalani is Bombay bureau chief
for BusinessWeek)
