Mr. F. C. Kohli, former Deputy Chairman and currently member of the Executive Committee, TCS, was conferred the MMA Business Leadership Award on December 7, 2000. The Madras Management Association (MMA) Award is in recognition of outstanding leadership in Business.      

Delivering the fifteenth Anantharamakrishnan Memorial Lecture in Chennai after receiving the Award, Mr. Kohli said, India would have to focus on hardware, infrastructure and human resource development to emerge as a major player in information technology. He said the current Indian hardware scenario was quite grim. For instance, India's hardware trade (which was mostly from resale of imports) was around $2 billion as compared to $30 billion in Singapore and South Korea, $40-45 billion in Taiwan and $8 billion in Thailand. Computer penetration was two computers per thousand population, compared to 150-200 in the South- East Asian countries.

According to Mr. Kohli, our hope was in outsourcing. Just as other countries outsource software from India, we could outsource hardware from others. While fabrication facilities are capital intensive, Indian industry could exploit the surplus capacities available in hardware fabrication worldwide.

India's IT industry could not develop on software alone, Mr. Kohli said. Advocating changes, he stated that software companies would have to move up the value chain, and extensively engineer system software. With time, software would be increasingly complex, and niches would have to be identified to gain the competitive edge. Like Israel, India too would have to look at software services for the upper end of the technological spectrum.

According to Mr. Kohli, manpower productivity needs to increase by a factor of two or three. Skills would have to be updated continuously and client base diversified; business service and application service providers should grow in volume and variety.

Likewise, the quantity and quality of engineers need improvement. While the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science turn out 2,500 engineers at the bachelor level annually, at least 50 other institutions produce students of the same number. It remains to be seen whether the students from these institutions are of the same calibre as the IITs and IISc. Efforts are on to bring in structural changes and upgradation of facilities at the Regional Engineering Colleges.

Mr Kohli reminded the gathering that India is far from being a software superpower at present. The software output last year was $5.7 billion compared to a world trade of $350 billion. In comparison, Israel and Ireland operate at similar levels in software businesses, though they have much lower population of less than three million.

Background information:
The MMA Business Leadership Award was instituted in 1959 in memory of late S Anantharamakrishnan, its founder-president. The objective is to honour those who have set glorious examples of outstanding leadership in business both at personal as well as institutional levels. The award is presented at the annual convention of MMA. This year Mr Kohli was conferred the award on Dec 07 at Chennai. Mr Kohli delivered the 15th Anantharamakrishnan Memorial Lecture on the occasion.