75 Years of Indian Independence

Today is Independence Day in India. But more than that, today, in 2022, it is the 75th anniversary of India's independence from Britain in 1947. For those of you whose knowledge of Indian history is even less than mine, one important aspect of independence is that colonial "India" consisted not just of the India of today but also of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Independence Day in Pakistan was yesterday, August 14th. Apparently to have a different date from India. Independence Day in Bangladesh is March 26th, when the country, previously East Pakistan, declared itself independent from Pakistan.

India's population is huge, only exceeded by China and only by a little. India has 1.38 billion people, almost exactly four times the population of the US. However, its area is 1.27 million square miles, almost exactly a third of the area of the US. So the population density of India is over ten times that of the US.

My Visits to India

There are a lot of immigrants in Britain from the Indian subcontinent, so like most people living in Britain, my first experience of India was not from visiting the country but through its food. There are actually more Indian cuisine restaurants in Britain than there are fish & chip shops, and famously chicken tikka masala (not an authentic Indian dish and probably invented in Glasgow) was voted as the UK's most popular dish in 2012.

I first went to India in the early 1990s. On the first visit, I only went to Delhi. We were considering setting up a development group in India and were talking to companies that might be good partners, although the only one I remember was Prabhu Goel's Software & Technologies (S&T). The two things that struck me most on that first visit were that there are a lot of people everywhere you go and that the differences among them are very profound. Inside the S&T office in Noida, you could have been in California (but with more saris). Step outside, and there were people foraging for things to sell for (I assumed) tiny amounts of money.

As it happened, that first visit was also the weekend of "Beat the Retreat," a military ceremony. It also turned out that my colleague's uncle was Captain of the Presidential Guard of Honor. So we got VIP seats in a grandstand. Sonia Gandhi was just a few rows in front of us. The Honor Guard arrived, all on horseback, escorting the president, with my colleague's uncle on the first horse. The rest of Beat the Retreat was the most colonial thing I've ever seen. Indian soldier bands in kilts playing the bagpipes, that sort of thing. In the evening, the uncle had a party, and I discovered the weird practice that the Indians inherited from the British that you only drink before dinner, not after. So at a party like that, dinner isn't served until 11:30, and then everyone leaves.

During my second visit, we went to Delhi again, but also Bangalore (now Bengaluru) and Hyderabad. I managed to be a tourist for a day in Delhi, seeing Red Fort, the India Gate, Raj Ghat (the Mahatma Gandhi memorial), and more. I also took a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Then to work.

We ended up working with Hyderabad-based CMC (Computer Maintenance Corporation). This had been set up when the Indian government forced all US-based multinationals to leave the country. One of those was IBM, meaning that there were 800 IBM installations with nobody to maintain and service them. CMC was set up to do that, and subsequently expanded to other similar tasks. CMC set up a team to work with us. Funnily enough, everyone on that team eventually relocated to the US.

Subsequently, I visited India to attempt to convince ST Microelectronics to purchase VaST Systems Technology's virtual platform tools (which they did not, unfortunately). I did have a great lunch with an old Ambit colleague in the Sheraton. They have the biggest tandoors you can imagine, cooking entire shoulders of lamb and naan which is 6 feet long. With just two of us, we went for a less dramatic lunch.

Since I rejoined Cadence in 2015, I have been to Bengaluru for CadenceLIVE India (or CDNLive in the past) several times and visited our Noida office, where we have many bloggers. While at Noida, I also interviewed Jaswinder Ahuja, the Managing Director of Cadence India (who has been at Cadence so long that I knew him from the last time I worked at Cadence twenty years ago). See my post Jaswinder's Only Job Interview.

Three Things the British Left Behind at Independence

Depending on what you read, the British Crown extracted a lot of wealth from India during the period of colonial rule from roughly 1858 to 1947, wealth measured in trillions of dollars by some accounts. Prior to that, from 1757, much of India was effectively ruled by the East India Company, based in London. Prior to that, from around 1600 onwards, there was various trade with India that was done on a normal commercial basis;

I noted three things that still exist in India derived from the British colonial era:

• The English language
• The railways
• The civil service

English

Nobody seems to know how many dialects are spoken in India, numbers range from dozens to "thousands of mother tongues." Wikipedia says 447. The Indian government lists the main ones as Assamese, Bangla, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Kannada, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Santali, Sindhi, and Urdu. When educated Indians need to talk to each other, they use English. Instruction in the major universities, especially the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), is in English. I went for lunch with a friend from Ambit days in Bengaluru and asked him if there was a local dialect that everyone uses, and he said his kids just spoke English all the time.

When telecommunication costs came down, and the internet started its exponential growth, India was considered as an ideal center for English-speaking call centers and performing English-speaking consulting contracts. Consulting was a mixture of Indian companies like Wipro, Tata, and Infosys, but also groups supporting big consulting companies like Accenture or IBM. Both of these segments boomed.

India graduates over 1.5 million engineering graduates every year and many companies, mostly American, set up engineering groups in India. Almost every semiconductor company in the world has one or more subsidiaries in Inda. Cadence has four engineering groups in India, one in Bengaluru (fka Bangalore), one in Noida (a suburb of New Delhi), one in Pune, and one in Ahmedabad. Of course, all those semiconductor subsidiaries are customers or potential customers for Cadence, so we support our Indian business from India too.

Indian Railways

Today, Indian railways have about 42,000 miles of track. At independence, this was about 50,000 miles, but don't forget "India" was today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. About 15,000 miles of those 50,000 miles went to West and East Pakistan (today's Pakistan and Bangladesh). Indian railways "drive on the left" since they were originally built using British expertise. India cars drive on the left too. Trivia fact: French trains drive on the left as well, since their first railways were built by British engineers.

It is estimated that India today has 30M cars for a population of 1.4B (or 1,400M). So the railways remain very important for transporting both freight and people. I tried, but failed, to find an estimate of the number of cars in India in 1947, but I couldn't find a number. Let's just go with "not many." After all, there were "not many" cars in any country in the late 1940s.

The Raj

The Indian Administrative Service today seems to derive from the framework created by the British in the nineteenth century in the Imperial Civil Service, or ICS. India had a population of 300 million or so in that era, so you might assume that a huge number of British were required to run the country. But, in fact, the administrative elite was never more than 1200 people. The rest of the organization was staffed by Indian locals.

Apparently, working as an ICS officer was less glamorous than the stories:

Much nonsense has been written about the romantic, glamorous notion of a single ICS officer riding around his district, dispensing even-handed justice to a grateful and submissive peasantry. Settling law cases before breakfast, such a paragon apparently corrected land records before lunch, shot a tiger or two before dinner, and wrote some Latin verse before taking a cold bath and retiring to a camp bed. The reality was far more prosaic. Stripped of its glamorous trappings, some of which had little reality away from the pages of memoirs and autobiographies, the job of most ICS officers was hard, unremitting, not particularly well rewarded, and sometimes frustrating. Neither should we over-estimate how much an lCS officer could hope to achieve. Operating always on a shoe string, the British Raj could make only a limited impact upon the fabric of Indian life. The vast scale of the sub-continent, the ravages of disease and the vagaries of the climate were unrelenting constraints which inhibited change.

Of course, on August 15th, 1947, the Imperial Civil Service run by the British ceased to exist.

CadenceLIVE India

This may seem a bit prosaic after all this "75 years of independence" stuff, but CadenceLIVE India will take place in Bengaluru at the Radisson Blu Bengaluru Outer Ring Road on September 14th and 15th. Registration will open on August 16th (tomorrow if you are reading this post on the day that it appears).

Watch this space for the agenda when it is available.

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