Indo-US Partnership - new media

Face to face
How do you rate the quality of the Indian students and
entrepreneurs?
The Indian students we get at Stanford are simply
spectacular and they make great entrepreneurs; they come
into Stanford probably not knowing much about
entrepreneurship. One of the greatest advantages of being
a university located in the Silicon Valley is that you can't
avoid being a good university. I have seen a tremendous
number of students, some of my own as well as those who
have gone on to being entrepreneurs and have been very
successful at it.
Could you name some of the students who have made it
big in the Indian corporates?
There are several of them. Mukesh Ambani is a Stanford
graduate. We have several of our students, who have done
well in the entrepreneurial world and there are those who
have made it big in the United States. Students from India
coming into United States usually doing their graduate
work here and go on to important careers like start-ups or
venture capitals in the industry. Yogendar Dalal made it big
in a venture capital company. Amit Singh had an Internet
Start-up. Amit Agarwal, a student of mine, went to MIT. He
started off in Boston.
How many Asians do you have in the faculty with special
respect to Indians?
We have several Indians on the faculty. A fair number of
Asians dominate primarily from India. The faculty
consists of Asians and Asian-Americans probably 15% and
that number just seems to be growing steadily.
What was it a couple of years ago?
Much more. Half that, 10 years ago and has been growing
since then. The number of graduate students has been
increasing. India is now our second largest source of
international students and the gap seems to be closing in
with China. India is now growing faster than China is
doing at the moment.
How do you rate it percentage wise?
At the graduate level a third of our students are
international and India is ranked as second. Indians
constitute 20-30% of the graduate students. So, overall
about 10% of our graduate students are from India, China,
India, Korea, and Taiwan. Since Stanford is on the west
coast, engineering and science students naturally come
from Asia.
There is a lot of hue and cry about outsourcing; what is
your view about it?
My opinion is that if one operates a business after figuring
out how to operate it, then making that business as official
as possible should be his goal. Doing that would require
you to use the most cost-effective talent around the world
and clearly in some cases it makes sense to use that talent
here in India. It is important to understand the economics
of such things in order to have a holistic view.
What are the areas that the US and India can synergise in
outsourcing?
Understanding how to do outsourcing, we have an
undergraduate student from North Dakota who has been
studying the various outsourcing methods in India. She is
trying to understand how it works, what the dynamics are
like, and what is more efficient. These are the kind of
things that we must be doing more often to understand
how business works. The areas of study that are gaining
prominence are science and engineering research. If one
thinks about the problems of the developed and the
developing world, the areas that stand to be noticed are
energy and its production. The question that comes to
mind is how are we going to do sustainable energy
production. This is an area where cooperation on all fronts
is the key to making the most out of research.
Looking at India and China, we all have our strengths;
what are our weaknesses that we need to improve upon?
In the case of India one can quickly name the challenges,
which face her even today, one of the them is
infrastructure, while China seems to make most of its
investments in infrastructure. Taking a cue from that, India
has to do more on the infrastructure front so that China
does not get to far ahead. I think that the business process
is clearly aligning taxation with the economics of it, and all
this is going to be challenges for India in order to make
herself as competitive as she can be globally. India has lots
to offer, such as an educated work force, a gigantic cost
advantage in terms of labour, and then all one needs to do
is to leverage it as much as possible.
What would be your message to the Indian business
community?
I would say that the Indian business community has to
continue to innovate and look for ways in which it can add
value. It's going to have to get government support to create
the environment in which it can do so. But I think that
there is a very natural cooperation between the US and the
Indian business community and I think leveraging that
optimises the value of the contribution from India and the
United States, which will be the best for both the
countries.
INDO-US BUSINESS December 2004
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