BENGALURU: Speakers at a session on innovation at the Commonwealth Science Conference on Wednesday gave insights into how they built their areas of work and how innovation in industry helped India.
N R Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys Technologies Ltd., said, “Today, this industry brings $40 billion to this city. Foreign universities such as Cornell came to help us in our research. No one from the Indian Institute of Science came until Prof P Balaram came to us much later. Now, we have created an ecosystem where researchers in higher institutes will help us.” “The software sector provides the most number of jobs in industry. TCS, Infosys and Wipro add more jobs than any other company and have contributed more to the Indian economy than any other company in the last 100 years,” he said.
Murthy said the software industry was expected to grow at 12 to 14 per cent this year and that it contributed 5.5 per cent to last year’s GDP. The story of globalisation was also the story of innovation in India and China. India learnt to produce high quality software in a short time to reach other countries. Companies in the USA and India learnt to complement each other, he said.
“We are leaders in cloud, big data, have contributed to fishermen-friendly mobile solutions, low-cost ATMs, tsunami alerts, remote patient monitoring systems to name a few,” said Murthy. This has made a huge difference to India.
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman and Managing Director of Biocon Industries, spoke about how she started a successful company working on biotechnology, and her personal experiences.
Dr K Kasturirangan, former head of ISRO, said, “Annually, India spends $1 billion to run the space programme. Our future space programmes include Astrosat, a satellite that will make an all-sky survey in X-ray and UV bands, do multiwavelength studies of cosmic sources and look at remnants of supernovae. It will be launched next year. Another satellite Aditya is designed to study processes in the Sun.”
“Antrix vision is our corporate wing and will help companies worldwide by offering services and cost-effective space solutions,” he said.