By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written 2003
When Bill Gates of Microsoft, the software behemoth, was in India European heads of state don’t get. Only the other Bill – Bill Clinton – in November on a four-day trip, he got media coverage that even many seemed to have received more coverage in Indian media. Look at the captions of some of the news items in the Times of India:
Titles of relevant stories:
- Bill Gates begins high-powered Indian visit
- Gates meets PM; briefs on AIDS prevention initiatives
- $100m just a drop, says Bill Gates (on the enormity of the AIDS epidemic in India and his $100 million contribution.
- India to be world’s tech hub, says Bill Gates
- Gates says personal fortune will go to philanthropy
Titles of trivial Stories:
- Bill Gates impressed with Jubilee Hall [of Hyderabad, India]
- Bill floors developers; (Software developers, and not the real estate types)
- Will Bill’s visit benefit Hyderabad?
- Gates to be accorded state guest status
- Making Bill Gates feel at home
- Catch him live, Bill’s at your Gates.
The Absurd Ones:
- Catering to Bill Gates’ tastes
- Is Bill Gates cute and sexy?
- Blame Bill Gates’ largesse on Leo, an astrologer’s interpretation of Gates’ interest in charities, and how India got Bill’s largest chunk.
Talk about ingratiating!
Bill had one-on-one meetings with the Indian president Abdul Kalam, prime minister Vajpayee, and several members of his cabinet, and he also addressed India’s power elite.
Bill got the coverage for a good reason. In the five decades after independence, India was saddled with Nehru’s controlled economy for solving India’s problems, which, in reality, drained India’s national treasury and stifled people’s enterprise.
In this background, the birth of India’s software industry without any support from anyone twenty years ago was God-sent. It was primed by young Indians from ordinary middle- and lower-middle-class families that, in the Indian social context, are not known for their entrepreneurial instincts. The software industry gave India the desperately needed stimulus that irreversibly changed the paradigms of Indian enterprise.
Till the Indian software industry came into being, Indian industry was, and mostly still is, in the vice-like grip of traditional mercantile families. In India, even today, in publicly traded Indian companies, as in politics and even in performing arts, succession in leadership continues to be endemically hereditary. Given this background, the software industry brought refreshing changes in the Indian corporate culture.
Besides, the Indian software industry was born in the wild without the government acting like a midwife. In the early days, the Indian politicians and bureaucrats had no idea of this new industry that required no huge capital, was very labor-intensive — a different kind of labor, though — and yet was very profitable. Not knowing anything about the industry, the netas (leaders) and their babus (bureaucrats), thank God, did not even know how to screw it up.
With Indian software export earnings nearing $10 billion (with India’s total exports over $50 billion, it was 20% of its exports), no wonder the Indian elite and the middle class see software as the vardaan (boon) from the Gods.
So, it is understandable Bill Gates got the attention he did during his 4-day Indian Digvijayam. That Bill is an object of derision among software developers here in the US and elsewhere was irrelevant to his adoring Indians.
But the Indian media went overboard in the way it fawned all over Bill, often behaving as if they were Bill’s PR arm.
During his stay in India, the Indian media gave wide coverage to Bill’s 100 million dollar donation to fight the scourge of AIDS in India that focuses on women taking preventive steps independent of their partners. In India, over four million people are HIV positive, and over a million people have full-blown AIDS.
I agree one should not see a gift horse in its mouth. But what got under my skin was a story in The Times of India (November 12, 02). The title of the story by Kalpana Jain blared: Gates Gives India More than Africa for AIDS. The story praised the Gates Foundation’s $100 million donation as the single largest grant given to any country so far:
“The grant for the AIDS program in Africa, which has the highest rates of infection, is $50 million, half of that announced for India. The only other grants that are over $100 million have been for global funds such as the International HIV/AIDS Alliance and the UN-initiated global fund to fight AIDS, malaria, and TB. The $100 million grant comes in addition to the $41 million in grants given earlier to India.”
So, as if India got a contract against stiff global competition, Kalpana Jain says that India clinched the largest grant from the richest individual for fighting a disease. That democratically elected Indian governments belonging to parties of all shades of ideology and its all-powerful bureaucracy should have done more to fight AIDS is the unmentioned subtext.
Kalpana, let me first begin by telling you that Africa is a continent, and India is a political nation-state. Without appearing supercilious and condescending, I can say that comparing Africa and India is preposterous. Africa’s problem is horrendous as a consequence of centuries of political exploitation by Europeans and Arabs; economic exploitation by Europeans, Arabs, and people from the Indian subcontinent; and spiritual exploitation by missionaries and the mullahs. And to this add Africans’ endemic internecine warfare. Besides, unlike any country in Africa, India
- stakes its claim for membership in the UN Security Council,
- has nuclear capabilities for both military and nonmilitary applications,
- has a standing army of over one million soldiers on active duty,
- has developed unmanned military spy planes,
- sends satellites into orbit for military and meteorological applications,
- has indigenously developed nuclear-tipped ballistic and surface-to-air missiles,
- brags that Indian healthcare professionals are now the backbone of the healthcare system in the US, UK, and Canada,
- boasts that its IT professionals are software gurus worldwide, has produced Nobel laureates in the sciences, and so on.
Yet India is incapable of addressing the basic pani-roti-langoti-dawa (water-food-basic healthcare) issues of her citizens.
While India is justifiably proud of its hoary past going back over five millennia, in the fifty years after independence, it did not fulfil its obligations to all its citizens, namely, providing them with skills and enabling them to live with dignity.
We can even make a case that all of India’s social and economic problems, including the explosion of AIDS, stem from the neglect of the basic duties and obligations of the state.
So, Kalpana Jain, it is a matter of great shame that India received more from Gates for fighting AIDS than what the entire continent of Africa got from Bill Gates for AIDS.
End Note: Gates, father of three sons, told this to his elite Indian audience about his foundation (New York Times, Nov. 11, 02): “I realialized about 10 years ago that my wealth [estimated at over 40 billion even after the collapse of Wall Street] has to go back to society. The fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best not passed on to one’s children. It is not constructive for them.”
Will the Indian industrial tycoons and political heavy weights falling head over heels to have a darshan of Gates try to put this idea into practice? Don’t bet on that. The Indian power elite routinely fall at the feet of sannyasis, swamis, pirs and lamas — Mother Teresa is the latest addition here — seeking their blessings. After politely listening what these swamis say on how they should conduct their temporal affairs, this power elite nonchalantly walks away going about its business as usual. END