He is often called the Father of Indian Software Industry. F C Kohli joined India's largest software company Tata Consultancy Services in 1966, at a time when technology was a zillion miles away from the Indian psyche. He headed TCS from 1974 and in 1994 was appointed its deputy chairman. Today, after spending 50 years in the Tata group and receiving numerous accolades, F C Kohli has retired, but continues to do his bit for the Tatas and the IT industry. He talks to Prasenjit Bhattacharya about the TCS story and the Indian IT sector.

How did you conceive the idea of TCS in the 1960s when there was no IT industry to speak of?

One doesn't start a company in times of boom. One just perceives some opportunity on the basis of what you see around yourself and seize the opportunity. We knew back in 1966 that computers were coming. In fact, Tata Electric started using computers in the early 60s, before TCS was even born. We understood the potential of technology and knew it will permeate at some stage. And what proved good for TCS was that right from our inception we had some interesting projects.

One of our first projects was to do a branch reconciliation project for 13-14 nationalised banks. In 1971, we computerised the database of the Bombay telephone directory, and when the directory came out of the press, it was printed from the digital tapes. A project of such complexity had been tried in only 3-4 countries previously and most international consultants said it was too complex a project for us to do.

How did TCS start bagging international projects?

The first real international project for TCS came in 1974 through Burroughs, which was related to a health care system project for them out of India. While people talk of outsourcing from India now, we started doing outsourcing back in the early '70s. Then in 1976-77, we did a project for the City of Detroit police force.

One thing that we realised very early was that the technology business was a dynamic one and knowledge needed constant updating in it. So, TCS built a lot of connections with US universities right from the beginning basically to keep track of what is going to happen in technology next year and the year after that. And we started training our staff right from day one.

Indian IT industry is today highly export-oriented. Do you feel the domestic industry can be a viable market for our IT companies?

India has yet to tap into the power of computers. Computers are still being largely used for simple activities, like e-mail. Computers can increase the productivity of a country manifold. In the last five years, productivity in the US has gone up by 3-4 times due to the effective use of information technology.

How do you view China as a potential rival to Indian software exports?

I think India should regard China as a benchmark in the infotech arena. China has a very vibrant software industry. However, while our software industry is tuned to the export market, theirs is for their internal needs. It's basically a difference in priorities. I think India should not be complacent about China's software prowess at all.

Can India and China collaborate?

Does one collaborate with one's benchmark or learn from them? See, China is developing an enormous amount of software systems, not just applications, in their own language. And once they change their priorities and start exporting, reaching $50 billion in software exports over a period of time is not impossible for them.

Can India emerge as a hardware export powerhouse, like China or Taiwan?

I think we can leverage a number of our software skills in increasing our hardware exports too. Areas like design engineering, embedded software and software on chip are some hardware export areas, where we don't need to put in millions of dollars worth of silicon foundries or factories. But for this, we need 3,000-4,000 microelectronics engineers in the country, much higher than the paltry 200 such engineers we have in our country these days.