Make bandwidth available to all: Kalam

NEW DELHI: In the small but packed hall of a New Delhi hotel that hosted Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Infosys's Narayana Murthy and others, president Dr A P J Abdul Kalam gave the event’s opening keynote address on “Bridging the two Indias.”

Kalam said it was critical to make bandwidth available for inclusion, because “the less educated you are, the more bandwidth you need to communicate! The most educated can manage with asynchronous means like email…the less educated need voice--or video.”

He also spoke of the critical need for education to make the millions of young people more employable for global needs, for which it wasn’t just connectivity but content that was urgently needed and, of course, teachers.

The president encouraged corporates to come together to create a separate rural development fund, with some contributions from their quarterly profit, run by an independent board that could help manage bandwidth and other technology deployment for rural and small town areas, which are being left behind by the rapid growth of corporate India and the cities.

Kalam said the “core competence of India” was that it was a billion-people democracy with multiple and very different cultures and languages. “If you don’t agree with me, write to me at www.presidentofindia.gov.in and I’ll reply in 24 hours,” he said.

Steve Ballmer spoke of the next ten years, which will pack more action and promise than even the last ten. Among other things, he said the promise of technology that was getting cheap enough, will someday -- still far away--have a computing device for every person in India, made the decade ahead an exciting time and place.

NDTV’s Prannoy Roy moderated a discussion in which Ballmer, N R Narayana Murthy, Ashok Jhunjhunwala and Manvinder Singh of Ranbaxy participated. He started off by asking Ballmer about the contrasting personalities of the top two at Microsoft: small, shy and geeky versus flambuoyant and six feet six. Opposites make for the best partnerships was the reply.

To a question on whether Google was making Microsoft change tracks and if we were going to get free software from Microsoft soon, Ballmer said the future held a mix of business models that would coexist and thrive, spurred by innovation.

Ravi Venkatesan kicked off the event, speaking of the contrasts in India: the millionaires and the malnourished children; the successful e-gov projects and the “graveyard of pilot projects.”

Ballmer may be a less known face in India, but Bill Gates has been a regular visitor. While Gates handles the product roadmap and technological vision, Ballmer runs the company's operations and finances. Ballmer was Bill Gates’ dorm mate at Harvard, and became the 24th employee of Microsoft in June 1980. That makes him the longest-serving employee of Microsoft and its first business manager, hired by Gates for a $50,000 salary and a small stake in the company, which grew to eight per cent by the next year, when Microsoft became a corporation (he sold nearly a tenth of his shareholding in 2003, leaving him with four per cent stake). Ballmer became the president of Microsoft in 1998 and the CEO in 2000.

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