Thanh Nien set out on a visit to India to find out what makes the South Asian giant tick.

In this effort, Thanh Nien was advised by a Vietnamese IT firm that has extensive ties with Indian partners.

The delegation, also comprising several IT executives, left in late January.

Unlike Thomas L. Friedman, who in his bestselling “The World Is Flat” seeks to find out why Indians are apparently depriving many Americans of their jobs, we were hoping merely to learn from the secrets of India’s success.

Our enthusiasm was, however, tested as soon as we landed in the Indian capital at midnight after a 10-hour journey.

New Delhi Airport turned out to be dilapidated and under renovation.

The cold weather – the temperature was 3 degrees Celsius – and the indifferent attitude of the airport personnel too came as a dampener.

Customs demanded a US$200 duty on a carton of food that only cost $500.

But they hastily let us go after we kicked up a ruckus.

En route to the hotel, we were again thinking about some dizzying statistics Friedman quotes in his book – the number of tax returns the Americans outsourced for processing to India jumped to 400,000 in 2005 from a mere 25,000 in 2003.

Our meeting with the Vietnamese ambassador, Vu Quang Diem, the day we landed too played a part in rejuvenating our eagerness to explore India.

Two Indias

India comprises two distinct parts.

There is the dark side with its rampant corruption and stark poverty; the bright side is the spectacular economic growth rate which has thrown up a 300 million-strong middle-class, despite a plethora of problems.

India’s economic growth rate of 9 percent last year was one of the world’s highest for a major economy.

The World Bank ranks India as one of the world’s 10 leading economies.

The country is also soon forecast to outpace China in terms of GDP growth, and overtake Japan in terms of economic size in 2032 and the US in 2050.

IT-oriented education, high teacher benchmarks

IT spearheads India’s education strategy and is the key to producing hundreds of thousands of “global citizens” every year.

Visiting Lotus Valley school, 20 km south of New Delhi, we realized that student-based teaching methods have played a vital role in developing children’s creativeness.

In addition to IT, the eclectic curriculum also has subjects like painting, music, dancing, yoga, and tennis.

When we expressed our surprise that a Master’s graduate was in charge of the fifth grade – something most Vietnamese postgraduates will sniff at – principal Madhu Chandra said her school only hired postgraduates up.

Such high benchmarks are, however, understandable.

Every year

India produces around three million university graduates, second only to China and the US Besides, 80,000 Indian students are studying in the US compared to only 60,000 from China.

Computer education got a big boost in the country after four formidable names, NIIT, Intel India, Microsoft, and State Bank of India, formed a strategic partnership to assist private sector schools with IT education.

NIIT, a global IT training giant, leads the way with its NIIT K-12 (Kindergarten to 12th standard) program that has content for major subjects like English, math, sciences, and social sciences.

NIIT says it has already developed 4,000 hours of content based on the school curriculum and plans to develop on it by training teachers and then students in IT-assisted education practices.

Vijay K Thadani, co-founder and CEO of NIIT, says, “The solution for software for IT-assisted computer education includes all basic subjects in the curriculum in four areas of computer-aided education - teaching, learning, experimentation, and examination.”

The K-12 program has been exported to China and other Asian countries.

The Home and The World

Ambassador Diem told us that India’s younger generations followed the philosophy espoused by writerpainter-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore in his acclaimed book Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) and were always willing to share the secrets of success.

Not surprisingly, companies treated our delegation with hospitality and cordiality during the trip.

While visiting NIIT’s headquarters, we were surprised that all top executives came to meet us, receiving the delegation with great friendliness.

We discovered that Indian businesses do not do beer or wine or any other form of entertainment for guests during working hours.

They instead make the most of the time to discuss business.

But what made the biggest impression on us was the relentless quest by Indian firms to forge ahead in the face of massive difficulties.

An Indian IT firm told us that US giants like Microsoft and IBM were unable to conquer the Indian market because of the emergence of strong domestic firms.

In the private sector, a clutch of major companies have emerged to strut their stuff on the world stage.

Infosys, Tata, Birla, Essar, Jindal, Ranbaxy, and JK have all grown to become major investors abroad.

They have invested in the rail sector in Malaysia and explore for oil in Russia and Vietnam.

Recently, the Tata Group made headlines after acquiring the UK-based Corus steel firm at over $12 billion.

The government has set a target of becoming the world’s software hub by 2010 by attracting IT majors to Bangalore and other cities.

Rubbing shoulders with the IT sector are others like the nuclear and biotechnology industries, which too are thriving.

The government subsidizes education and agriculture and offers protection for farmers against cheap imports.

The aviation industry has opened its doors to the private sector, including foreign.

The country has 126 airports, including 11 international.

Private firms are pouring money into building new airports in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Ambassador Diem attributed India’s achievements to the across-the-board economic reform it had launched in 1991 that envisaged developing an open economy focused mainly on the IT and service sectors.

On the flight back to Vietnam, we kept thinking about Vietnamese businesses who are also keen to make a mark globally.

The question is, is the government truly rolling out the red carpet for them? Lessons drawn from newly-emerged countries like India can be handy in assessing this.

Reported by Vo Khoi