ONLY WITH R&D CAN YOU ESCAPE THE TRAP AND GO TO THE NEXT LEVEL

The world has got into the twin problem of debt and demographics. We have 20 years of a runway, but we have to capitalize on it for India2047 to succeed. For that R&D will play a key role. On the sidelines of a ManageEngine CIO meet in Chennai, we caught up with Zoho Co-founder & CEO Sridhar Vembu and got him to gaze into the future to check out India's chances.

- Sunil Rajguru

CAN WE DO A MAKE IN INDIA FOR THE WORLD? CAN WE MAKE WORLD CHAMPION COMPANIES AND PRODUCTS?

It ultimately comes down to investing in R&D. We're investing just 0.7% of our GDP. We have to invest a lot more. It's as basic as that. It's about the private sector because this cannot be done by the government. It's not like a policy that can be formed tomorrow to spend the money. It has to be every company. Why are Chinese companies spending in R&D and Indian companies not? The government's role is just to be a catalyst, to keep on prodding companies to invest in R&D.

We have to have a national catch-up phase. Japan, (South) Korea, Taiwan and China all had that catch-up phase. China said: We must master every technology. I think most business leaders recognize it, but we have to build an R&D culture.

Back in the 1980s, we were producing PCs. Those of us who are old enough remember that we were producing hardware in India. By the 1990s, it all went away. Why did they go? Because we lost critical talent. We lost talent because we don't have an R&D commitment to retain that talent. In fact, in 1990, India was way ahead of China in terms of PC hardware. It is very sad to realize now that even in networking hardware India was ahead. Now look at Huawei which as a company is larger than Cisco.