Keep violent politics aside, focus on innovation: Pai

Start-ups in this metro have been making waves in the industry, but where does Chennai fare at the national level? Padma Shri awardee, Infosys former CFO and current Chairman of Manipal Global Education TV Mohandas Pai believes the city has a long way to go before the start-ups can realise their potential. The industry leader, who has never shied away from making strong comments, in an interview to DT Next talks about how Chennai needs to keep its “violent” politics aside and focus on innovation. Excerpts:

How do you see TN in the country’s start-up environment?

TN has a major problem of not being viewed as an open society which welcomes outsiders. There is fear among people because of violent Dravidian political fights. The rule of law is weak and the system is subverted. Currently, there is no narrative about growth and innovation except isolated incidents. The government has to create a positive image of the state.

Also, all the industries in Chennai are traditional. There is the auto business which is getting disrupted, the petrochemical industry has gone nowhere and there are other small-scale industries that are undergoing disruptions as they have not been able to upgrade to new technologies.

The software industry is there in some big way and in the start-up space innovation, SaaS (software as a service) companies such as Zoho have come up which have done extremely and are starting more companies and IIT-Madras has done remarkable work. But, somehow, this tendency of a young, vibrant place has not caught up with Chennai and the city has to do a lot more.

Take the case of Bengaluru for example, the city has a population of 1.2 crore and despite problems, their GDP is 120 billion, per capita income of $10,000, 20 lakh people in ITBT start-ups in about 35,000 companies. Also, 18 of the 34 unicorns are in Bengaluru and they employ around 2 crore people per year. And out of 20 lakh people, only 9 lakh are local Kannadigas. Others have come from different cities but they have all assimilated because Bengaluru is welcoming to outsiders and has decent infrastructure and good quality of life barring the traffic problem.

How to improve the situation?

Industry leaders need to get together and decide what kind of a city they want and how they can bring about a change. But, the leadership here is tired and old. The next-generation leaders have not come up. All the leaders that you see now have been there for 30-40 years. You can’t change the mindset of people, who have been doing the same thing for 30 years and it’s difficult for them to innovate. The next generation leaders need to come up and think of innovation from scratch. Take Ather for example. They started out in Chennai and moved to Bengaluru because they got the engineering talent there.

How do educational institutes fare in training young minds for the industry?

IIT-Madras is the best-kept secret in TN. They have good professors and are doing some good work but their work is not being implemented into the larger economy, which is unfortunate. Other institutions are lagging way behind. Anna University used to be extremely good at one point of time but it has not developed or upgraded itself with time.

TN has a 47% GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio) which is enormous when compared to the national ratio of 26%, but the quality is poor. So the state has to invest in high-quality labs. Set up labs with government funding in 3D printing, AI, machine learning IoT devices and big data. The government should pick 50 engineering colleges, give them money to set up the labs and create a culture of innovation in all of them.

Is there any aspect that can give Chennai an edge over Bengaluru?

Chennai has an enormous amount of talent and deep culture. It shows that people here are creative. Chennai can do great work in IT design, customer interfaces and software architecture. Because when you have creative people and culture-centric, content creation and AI can come up. Bengaluru has creative people but they are deep engineering-centred. But they are not creative in the arts. So Bengaluru needs more creativity and Chennai needs more in the fields of deep engineering and software. For example, if you want to train a robot, if you use computer vision of a dancer learning the steps in Bharatnatyam and translate that into an app for a machine and train it how to learn the steps, you can easily create a humanoid. Using computer visions, you track the movement of a person thousands of times and there are patterns which can be translated into signals that can make the limbs of the humanoid move.

What can the government do to encourage innovation?

Well, Karnataka has the Elevate programme in which start-ups are asked to pitch in ideas and those with the top 100 ideas get Rs 50 lakh each. To begin with, the TN government can call for a competition. Invite all start-ups for ideas and give Rs 1 crore to each of the top 100 companies as a grant. This will create excitement. Youngsters will want to get involved in such initiatives and enthuse students too. They will start thinking, they will ideate and create something new. The government should also create a mechanism so that good, deserving companies can get the needed funding.