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Lessons from MIT's failed Indian
experiment
By Indrajit Basu
KOLKATA - For a country that has the
third-largest scientific and technical manpower
community in the world and a huge talent pool of
technology professionals, India has been a spectacular
under performer in inventing and creating technology
that addresses domestic needs. For instance, if research
output is measured by the number of scientific papers,
India slips to 21st place globally.
It wasn't a
surprise, therefore, that in September 2001, to much
fanfare, the Indian government and the United
States-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), one of world's most prestigious technology
institutes, joined hands to set up Asia's first
technology incubator project in India, christened Media
Lab Asia (MLA or MLAsia)and with a projected cost of
US$1.09 billion.
"It is just not enough for
India to show a 45 percent annual growth in software
exports," said the then information technology and
telecom minister Pramod Mahajan. "We have to now harness
our technical skill base to develop ideas to benefit
India's billion plus population."
And, "the
overarching goal of Media Lab Asia will be to facilitate
the invention, refinement and deployment of innovations
to benefit all sectors of Indian society," said Nicholas
Negroponte, co-founder and chairman of the MIT Media
Lab. "Media Lab Asia will not be a bricks and mortar
initiative. Rather, it is intended to be a distributed
organization that will work with industry,
non-government organizations, government, and most
importantly, ordinary people, to bring these innovations
to villages across all of India."
MLA, the Asian
version of the MIT's formidable Media Lab project, which
is a globally-known brand name, was visualized as a
federal structure, not only to grow eventually into an
entity larger than the original, but also trigger other
Media Lab projects in Australia, China, Singapore and
Korea.
The Indian government was to provide 20
percent of the project's funding. The rest of the money
was to come from corporate sponsors. Five Indian
Institutes of Technology (IITs), the country's
prestigious engineering school, were to carry out
research to develop technology products, while MIT's
role was to provide the crucial methodology for product
innovation and for taking research to end users.
But almost 20 months down the track, MLA remains
a non-starter and India and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology are now embroiled in a spat over its
failure, with MIT blaming a clash of cultures, and New
Delhi alleging that the facility was too expensive and
yielded few results.
On May 8, India's present
IT and telecom minister, Arun Shourie, issued marching
orders to 40-odd employees of Media Lab Asia and said
that India wasn't keen to continue with the association
of Negroponte and MIT in Media Lab Asia.
"The
contract with MIT was terminated on March 31," said
Shourie adding, "The decision [to end the joint venture
agreement] was taken after I had three meetings with
professors who were doing research for Media Lab Asia.
They told me that MIT had not contributed anything to
the project. MIT was doing nothing in research here.
Moreover, there was no communication between Indian
researchers and Media Lab US. The project was too
expensive," said Shourie. "Salaries and expenditure were
out of line with the government scales. Nearly $2
million of India's $7 million investment had gone toward
royalties and lecture fees and the CEO of the MLA had a
salary that was 15 times that of the chief who manages
India's entire space program."
MIT- Media Lab
officials, however, say that a clash in working styles
was the root of all problems. According to Walter
Bender, Media Lab's director, Shourie disagreed about
the direction of the project. "The bottom line is that
Shourie wanted to run it like other programs are run,"
says Bender. "That's not the way Media Lab works. It
bets on people, not on products. Apparently, this is not
the way India wants it to operate."
Bender also
says that the two sides didn't see eye-to-eye on the
Media Lab's free-flowing, highly experimental research
style: "The Media Lab is a little unusual in that we try
to advocate a bottom-up approach to doing research.
That's not the norm, and apparently that's not what the
minister wants to do going forward."
But
although MIT is out, paradoxically, MLA is here to stay.
Shourie said last week that the project will continue to
focus on research projects aimed at bridging the digital
divide, despite MIT's withdrawal from it, and will
continue to be named as Media Lab Asia. That's because
MIT has little in its legal arsenal to stop the Indian
government from using "Media Lab", a name it owns.
According to initial agreement between the two, in the
event that MIT did not wish to continue or the
government wished to continue unilaterally, MIT would
have no right over the Media Lab Asia name. Ministry of
IT officials say that MIT entered into such an agreement
in 2001 as it was keen to test the waters first without
committing to the project for the next nine years.
MIT's legal weakness doesn't end with losing the
right to use the MLAsia name. Its agreement with the
government stops it from going anywhere else in Asia and
creating an entity with the same "principal stated
objective". So if MLA wants to set up similar labs in
Korea and Japan, it can proceed without involving MIT.
However, MIT can enter into other types of Asian
ventures.
Meanwhile, according to reports, MIT
is trying to hold out an olive branch already. In a
written communication to sections of the Indian media,
Negroponte is reportedly to have said, "We wish MLAsia
well and expect that some research will continue between
the Media Lab-MIT and IITs. We are fully prepared to
consider future case-by-case research projects with the
government, IITs or other Indian organizations."
But Shourie until now has preferred to shrug off
such advances. "This would be a matter of international
arbitration and I would prefer not to comment on this
subject right now," said Shourie.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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