Beyond Software: The Reset India Needs
In conversation with Dr. L. Venkata Subramaniam, CEO of Qbit Force, he said, “We can be making a lot of DeepTech – quantum computers, semiconductors, advanced hardware. It’s just that we went on a trajectory of everyone becoming software engineers, everyone sitting in front of laptops doing certain things. I’m not saying that’s bad. All I’m saying is it was not necessary that 100% of Indians go and do that. There are many other things open out there…“
The landscape has still not changed.
You can see from the fact that the top ranks in JEE fill up computer science first. After admission, students in so called “lower” branches strive to “upgrade” their branch to computer science.
Students who still end up in “lower” branches, study computer science to ace the “tech” interviews. Electrical and mechanical, in my opinion, are probably more qualified to be referred to as “tech” than computer science today.
The world has grown beyond the two decades of software dominance. Though it is true that pay scale differs abnormally among these subjects, and it is justified too because your pay scale is largely determined by how much revenue your individual performance contributes to, and software is highly scalable, but it is also available as open source, and then there is AI.
Whereas, you still need competence to operate and establish open source hardware. The true winners at the end are going to be mathematicians, which very few even today realize.
Research is no longer a choice of desire, but essential if you want to survive in the long run. Complacency is no longer going to pay the bills. You actually have to be at the top of your game.
The bar to extraordinary achievement (and thus extraordinary pay) is rising every single day. India is a bit far behind, not because we lack the capability, we can actually catch up and go beyond very fast, but we are still running on colonial DNA, rather worse than back then I would argue, at a statistical scale.
And I think it boils down to quality of life.
If citizens feel happy about the public infrastructure available to them – if healthcare is affordable, policy implementations are robust, corruption is low, there is equity in society, etc. – there wouldn’t be so much fuss about salaries.
Beyond a certain point, money doesn’t equate to happiness, unless you still need to grind to feel respected and get access to high-end facilities.
A lot of drastic improvements can begin at the policy level. Solutions are there. Other countries have done it. Playbooks are available. Adopt the good things others have done.
We just have to take the decision to implement it.
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