Digital Republic -- India's Rise to IT Power

This book analyses the rise of Indian computing. Interleaving history and memoir, it describes key moments and decisions that led to the slowdown in the 1960s and 1970s and the changes in the 1980s that fuelled the ascent of the software industry to pre-eminence in what has become one of the world’s most important industries.
Along the way the author reflects on the nature of science, the importance of computing and the interplay of theory, experiment and technology. He discusses the wide differences in the academic perception of computing in India and the rest of the world and how it affected the growth of Indian computer science as well as the computing industry.

This memoir is not a technical history and reading it does not need technical knowledge. It is a personal account of the unparalleled explosion of an industry seen through the eyes of someone who was there from the beginning.

Mathai Joseph played a leading role in the development of software in India. He started his research career in Cambridge in 1965 when computer science was unknown as an academic discipline. In 1968, he joined the hugely influential Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and spent 17 years doing research on software and running several national projects that helped to take computing to some prominence in India. For a number of years, he worked as a professor in universities in the US, the UK and The Netherlands, returning to India in 1997 to become research head of India’s largest software company, Tata Consultancy Services.

Digital Republic is a timely analysis of the rise and rise of India’s software industry.  
Starting with college in Bombay in the early 1960’s, the narrative moves to postgraduate work in Cardiff and Cambridge at the time when computing began to take form and its boundaries better understood. To be young then meant seeing change: the explosive effervescence of pop music, fashion growing from both the fizz of Carnaby Street and the war surplus stalls in Portobello Road, literature moving past the existential pipe-dreams of the Beats.

The next chapters are set at the redoubtable Tata Institute of Fundamental Research where science was revered. Computing however was considered a bag of techniques suitable only for solving large numerical problems. Outside the TIFR, India began to confront the realities of computing, with opposition by unions countered by the relentless move of technology. Despite the odds, computer science was made to grow in that inhospitable soil and his research group won recognition among its worldwide peers. At TIFR, the success was viewed with complete indifference: barriers put in place corralled computing within narrow boundaries and stifled further progress. So Mathai Joseph pursued his research goals in the UK where he was offered a chair in computer science.

Going to the University of Warwick brought many changes, from the constrained India of the 1980’s to the first flush of Thatcherite Britain, from the uncertainties of computing at TIFR to the strident demands of teaching and research in a challenging environment. The university administration sought total control over departments while the government played off university against university and massively raised student numbers. In this demanding environment, simple survival was possible but success needed hard-fought recognition for courses taught, work done and research money earned.

The draw of the home land proved irresistible and Mathai Joseph returned to India in 1997. The financial constraints of university research disappeared and the demand was for quick achievement. This period of furious growth of the Indian software industry raised accusations from within and without of incarcerating young people in a web of body-shopping and dull mindless work. In fact, it was the formative time of an enormously successful industry where research and development had to find a way to contribute to the work of fast-moving proje