Kiran Karnik, who led Nasscom and the Indian IT and BPO story with great distinction till recently, has a cherished view that the next big option for Indias IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) is not going to be China, Poland, or Mexico; rather, it will be the great Bharat.

A trip to rural Uttar Pradesh on International Womens Day led to an encounter with one of Indias most enterprising women entrepreneurs, demonstrating to me and my colleague the real opportunity before us. Born and raised in an industrialist family in Pune, Urvashi Sahni, an educationist with a difference, moved to Lucknow after marriage, at the tender age of eighteen. The move from Pune to rural Uttar Pradesh brought her in touch with the real issues of the Indian heartland. Today, she runs a bouquet of ventures that could provide inspiration to many others in the field. The Study Hall School in Lucknow is a school like any other, but it uses a multi-modal pedagogy process that uses technology to deliver interesting concepts like Mathematics and Biology. The same school infrastructure also houses Prerna, an organization that gives a number of underprivileged girls access to the same teachers and technology, thus, creating new stars.

Similarly, in the village of Kanaar is Vidyasthali, a school that caters to seventeen villages with dedicated teachers from the city, creating a clean atmosphere for rural education, thereby showing what the tens of thousands of schools in rural Bharat could be with the right levels of passion and commitment. And back in Lucknow, our dynamic entrepreneur, Urvashi, is experimenting with two more innovations that can transform the fortunes of the underprivilegedDigital Study Hall that is repurposing video content into digital formats to serve a hub-and-spoke format that can expand the reach of quality education while we wait for universal broadband access to deliver Internet-based education on a countrywide scale.

Ganesh natarajan

Urvashis final innovation takes this story from education to deploymentGrameen India is a software product-testing center that employs rural children with basic school education trained on manual testing and test script automation. This model of employment is one of the most scalable models of village resource creation that all of us in IT and BPO have started talking about over the last few months.

The problem with our education system is that it has either focused on high-quality elitist residential schools catering to the top strata of society or left smaller schools to rot and decay with low commitment of teachers. The demographic dividend that we hear about will remain on paper if we dont improve the scale of quality education and the opportunities for gainful employment, which is the primary imperative for a responsible government and society.

The solution to this digital divide will not be found by theory and pontificationthe IT industry and many other sectors like retail, construction, and BPO need to look at Bharat as a commercially viable alternative to India and find and fund a thousand Urvashis to transform our countrys landscape and capabilities into real valuefor individuals, communities, and the country!

The time has come for the transformation of education at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, of the deployment of all of India rather than just the top two-dozen cities in the services industry and of the entire mindset that has kept large segments of our country in the shackles of ignorance and denial of opportunity for too long. The Indian IT and BPO industry can and should take the lead!

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