MAGAZINE

NEEDED, A POLICY TO BOOST INDIAN R&D
Jaspreet (MBA-I)
India’s telecom giants have two
obsessions: battling one another and
getting more spectrums for use without
succumbing to price gouging by the
monopolist owner, the government of
India. Contrast this with what China’s
telecom giant is up to. Huawei is rolling
out a Gigabit mobile network, that is, a
mobile network capable of transmitting
data at rates in excess of a million bits per
second, for Deutsche Telecom. India’s
most advanced 4G network would be
proud to offer speeds one-tenth that.
Huawei is also trying out the technology
for Vodafone in England.
The company uses advances in
aggregating multiple bands of spectrum to
achieve this. It has emerged a world leader
in telecom technology and will be right up
there as chief vendor when the advanced
nations move over to 5G technology in
about five years.
Huawei employs some 1, 50,000 people,
half of them in R&D. No Indian company,
research lab or university department has
the capability even to determine if any bits
of the telecom kit deployed in our
networks have chunks of software that
could pose a security threat, leave alone
develop such equipment on its own.
For national ambitions of greatness in the
digital economy to have traction in the real
world of Indian technology companies, we
need an industrial policy that pushes and
pulls companies into serious R&D and
associated assumption of risk. Given its
demography, India will supply the
maximum number of engineers to the
world. We need fresh policy thinking to
have those who do stay back in
engineering contribute to India’s
technology heft.
Of course, it is not fair to compare telecom
service providers with telecom equipment
makers. But except for one Shyam
Telecom, India hardly has any R&D-based
makers of telecom equipment. And since
Indian telecom operators refuse to offer
custom to Indian equipment makers, they
cannot grow. The state owned C-DoT, in
its heyday under Sam Pitroda, showed
some promise in indigenous telecom
R&D, but that got scuttled when some
foreign technology collaboration was
foisted on C-DoT.