HOW DO YOU GET INDIA & BHARAT TOGETHER?

Thompson P. Gnanam, Managing Director and Global CEO, 3i Infotech, looks back at the tech changes that have taken place in finance along with the future of Bharat & India; mainly how every problem is also an opportunity. Edited excerpts from a video interview.

- Sunil Rajguru

Looking at the 1980s and 1990s

In the 1990s, India was graduating away from being a socialist to a capitalist or centrist country. The 1991 Liberalization helped us in getting access to Western technology. The core elements of the financial and tech sectors took off with the telecom revolution because that was the backbone before we entered the computer era. That was the clear starting point. C-DOT brought in one of the first major changes. Our first software technology park was set up in Bangalore. That gave birth to the pioneers in the technology industry.

At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s was the death of the typewriter. Because we had the PCs with Windows, a more user-friendly interface with LAN and a transformation started happening.

Like any industrial revolution, there was resistance to change. We had a contract with a bank and one service engineer came back and said that the system was getting down every now and then. We found that one of the bank staff hated the new computers, so he used to pull out the cable to ensure that the computers were down. That is the level of change management that we had to do.

From a banking perspective, technology transformation started happening from 1996 onward with the launch of IDRBT (Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology) and INFINET (Indian Financial Network) in 1999. INFINET was the start point in secure transactions.

The millennium bug and the 2000s

Every problem is an opportunity. Y2K was an important milestone and built the Indian IT industry today and took it to the next level. It gave access to our engineers to work in American banks. There was a big IT and banking convergence. The banking industry was the single biggest consumer of technology.