Men of Influence magazine


The next time you see the auto-suggestions Google gives you as you begin typing a query, and the snippet of text and links you get back, you can thank this young man in Mountain View.

Or take the 26-year-old who co-founded a software start-up in Bangalore, and helped turn it into a global technology services giant. And then, 28 years later, Nandan Nilekani quit Infosys, to drive something he believed in: giving a digital identity to a billion Indians.

That little start-up, and others like it, pushed India’s information technology and business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry across the $100bn mark in 2012. Nearly 70% of that was exports, according to industry association Nasscom, which says that India supplies nearly 60% of the IT-BPO services that are globally-sourced.

From space to farms

Then there’s Rikin Gandhi, who gave up his dream of becoming an astronaut just as he came really close to it. He left the United States and came to India to work with farmers, using digital video to change what and how they learned. This is also his story.

Locally-produced video is a simple innovation for rural India, where internet penetration is low. Mobile use is ramping up, though.

For every 100 people in rural India, there are more than 40 mobile-phone subscriptions (compared with 139 in the cities). Of the 900 million telecom subscriptions in India, 97% are mobile connections, according to Indian authorities.

The mobile brought disruptive change to an industry that’s rather old. India’s telecom sector is still governed by the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885. Landline phones grew from zero to 30 million in a century. Mobiles have grown from zero to 870 million in 18 years.



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