India is on track to have more software programmers than any other country soon. However, this is not necessarily good news as over 90% of Indian computer engineers lack proper domain knowledge and skills needed for today's jobs. While India produces many coders, the education system focuses too much on rote learning and not enough on applying skills to real-world problems. As a result, only a small percentage of graduates are considered employable. There is a growing need to improve coding skills and make education more hands-on to ensure Indian coders can compete globally and support the growing tech industry.

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T E C H S T A R T U P S , I N D I A I S Q U I E T L Y C O U N T I N G D O W N T O A
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2. In one corner of the room is the team that built Epimetrics, an app
that tracks fast-spreading diseases and predicts epidemics. It’s been
only a few days since its launch, and the app has already helped the city
administration prevent an outbreak of malaria.
Two tables away, the crowd steering team is monitoring heat maps
lighting up a Google Maps feed. The maps show the real-time movement
of crowds at the Kumbh, data for which is pulled from mobile phone
towers in the area. The team passes the data through a visualisation
algorithm that converts it into an easy-to-read spectrum from green to
red, signifying ‘not crowded’ to ‘chock-a-block’. The police use it to control
the flow of people and prevent overcrowding in any one place.
Ingenuity of this kind has its limits; crowd-control tools couldn’t stop
the ghastly death of over a thousand during the Hajj last month. But in
Nashik, Kumbhathon is helping host the safest Kumbh in years. No one
has gone missing. Barring stray reports of drowning, no one has died.
BENGALURU, A SUNDAY MORNING IN EARLY FEBRUARY.
Ola, India’s largest cab aggregator, is hosting a 24-hour hackathon in its
office. Most of the 200-odd coders are twentysomething men, carrying
laptops plastered with Game of Thrones, Incredible Hulk, and Green
Lantern stickers. The night before there was unlimited free food and
Red Bull, a DJ, even an impromptu birthday party. Now, with hours left,
everyone’s manic. The best coders will land jobs in the company that’s said
to be worth $5 billion (Rs 31, 585 crore). There are also cash awards.
The brief: Build anything that improves user experience.
Non-coders will be thrown by the vagueness of “build anything”. But if
you want to rev up coders, you could think of worse problem statements.
Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at MIT Media Labs and one of the
brains behind Kumbhathon, would tell you it doesn’t matter whether the
*(N//>NA ASHIK, HOURS BEFORE SHAHI SNAN, the royal
bath, an especially auspicious day at the Kumbh Mela. Ten million pilgrims
are expected to turn up this year, 25 lakh of them for the holy dip. It’s an
unfair burden for the bamboo barricades and police bandobast at one of
the most hazardous mass gatherings anywhere in the world. More than 40
people died in fires and stampedes and close to three lakh went missing
during the 2013 Allahabad Maha Kumbh. The Haridwar Kumbh of 2010
saw seven stampede deaths and two incidents of drowning. Nearly 40
died in the 2003 Kumbh, again in Nashik. Farther back, the 1954 Kumbh in
Allahabad left close to a thousand dead by some estimates. None of this
includes the toll taken by assorted infectious diseases at every edition.
A few kilometres from Nashik’s bathing ghats is
City Centre Mall. A group of young people with backpacks is making its way
to the grand ballroom on the mall’s top floor. Once inside, they take out
laptops from their bags and fall into groups.
They will spend the rest of the day writing code.
This is the mission command of Kumbhathon, a weeklong innovation
camp run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
association with, among others, Nashik’s engineering colleges, a couple
of IITs, the Maharashtra Police, and a bunch of companies including TCS,
Google, and Xerox. Where most see chaos, Kumbhathon’s coders see
data. The kind spewed by the behaviour of massive shifting crowds, or
germs. The idea is to use the data to unravel urbanisation’s most complex
problems. The ultimate goal: “Build multimillion dollar companies” that will
solve those problems, and “improve millions of lives”.
S> :*RAmAdoRAi
({~CHAIRMAN, NSDC
AND NSDA
P R O G R A M M I N G I S A
F U N D A M E N T A L S K I L L
A N D Y O U H A V E T O
S T A R T I N S C H O O L . ^ ~ *
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3. 105 FORTUNE INDIA
task is to prevent stampedes or make cab rides safer, as the Ola hackathon
winner set out to do. To code is to change the world. “The biggest cab
company in the world doesn’t own cabs. The biggest media company
doesn’t own media. People are going to schools without buildings,
transacting without cash. Soon they will grow food without farms,” Raskar
says. “All this amazing transformation is because of code.”
There’s a profusion of ways in which others have paid tribute to code.
Here’s Steve Jobs: “Everyone in this country should learn how to program
a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” Tech news portal
ReadWrite calls coding “the core skill of the 21st century”. Don’t trust
geeks? Take it from former British education secretary Michael Gove, who
unleashed the biggest reform in the country’s education system last year
by making coding lessons mandatory in schools for kids aged 5 upwards.
“Teaching pupils, over and over again, how to word-process, how to work
a spreadsheet, how to use programs already creaking into obsolescence
[is] about as much use as teaching children to send a telex or travel in a
zeppelin,” Gove reasons. “Our new curriculum teaches children how to
code ... not just how to work a computer, but ... how to make it work for
you.” Silicon Valley prophet Marc Andreessen sums up the urgency:
“Software is eating the world.”
It’s the kind of futurism that feeds the “coders love Star Trek” jokes.
Shailesh Nalawadi, former project manager at Google Maps and
Streetview and co-founder of Mavin, a company that wants to provide
cheap Internet in developing countries, says that’s because Star Trek is
coding utopia. “Spock is the prototypical engineer. In his world, you don’t
fight for money. You explore for the sake of exploring.” The job and the
cash are incidental. The true coder says, I got into this because I can build
anything. “Larry [Page] and Sergei [Brin] always asked us to solve the
10X problem,” Nalawadi reminisces. “Don’t improve by 20% or 40%.
Make it 10 times better.”
Contest (ICPC), the world’s oldest and
toughest competition for coders. Indian
coders have struggled to break into even
the top 50.
Turakhia says coding is a life skill in
a world where people communicate
more with smart devices than with
other people. Not everyone needs to
be writing complicated algorithms.
But if, as Michael Gove says, you want
to make technology “work for you”,
working knowledge of its lingua franca
is a must. “Millions of people are getting
access to intelligent and completely
programmable devices. If they learn
how to maximise their potential, they
You don’t have to begin with grand visions. Shashank N.D., whose love
of code grew into the health-care startup Practo, says all he wanted was
“to be part of something that has purpose. I thought it was ridiculous
that I could order a pizza in 30 minutes but not monitor my health
records online in that time. Someone had to build a smarter algorithm.”
Now that he has a business to run, Shashank misses coding. He stays
in touch through hackathons, like the one Practo conducted in March.
“Congratulations @RahoolGads on kicking ass at Practo Hackathon. A
brilliant hack on the Practo Tab. Can’t wait [for] the next hackathon!!” he
tweeted afterwards.
That’s not just nerdy excitement: Practo Tab—a device for doctors
to manage patient data and spare patients the bother of filling lengthy
forms—is one of Shashank’s big bets, the kind that has got investors
queuing up for a piece of his seven-year-old company. In a recent funding
round, a group led by Chinese behemoth Tencent pumped in $90 million.
Ola, which has coded critical new passenger safety features into its app
since the February hackathon, is reportedly raising $500 million.
THE DELUGE OF FUNDING FOR TECH STARTUPS
may have lionised the coder at the heart of it, but not everyone is
chuffed. Bhavin Turakhia, 35, learnt to code when he was 10 and was so
good that his teachers were soon taking lessons from him. At 18, Turakhia
started a web-hosting business with his brother, which grew into a
conglomerate of 13 companies, “all profitable”—without raising a penny
by way of funding. Last year, he sold three of the companies to a Nasdaq-
listed firm for $160 million. And yet, chances are you’ve never heard of
Turakhia or his company Directi in the noise around big bang deals.
So we expect him to be upset when we ask him about the zeitgeist in
Indian tech. He is, but not why we thought. “It’s annoying and frustrating
that China, Canada, even Poland, beats us year after year,” he says. The
reference is to India’s plight in the International Collegiate Programming
ShASHAnk > :*ND
({~CEO, PRACTO
I J U S T W A N T E D
T O B E P A R T O F
S O M E T H I N G T H A T
H A S P U R P O S E . ^ ~ *
2.3%INDIA
#UNSKILLED INDIA
52%U.S.
68%BRITAIN
75%GERMANY
80%JAPAN
96%SOUTH KOREA
>> India is at the bottom of the heap
when it comes to formal skilling for
its workforce.
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graphic source: draft national policy for skill
development and entrepreneurship 2015

4. 107 FORTUNE INDIA
“The software market is becoming increasingly crowded as large, multi-
line firms transform their portfolios to focus more on solutions that have
a direct business impact,” says C.P. Gurnani, vice chairman, Nasscom, and
CEO and managing director of outsourcing major Tech Mahindra. The
upshot: an urgent need to upskill 5 million-odd people.
Aruna Jayanthi, CEO of IT consultant Capgemini India, argues that
in terms of pure programming skills, Indian coders are on a par with
their global peers. But being competitive today is not only about writing
code—“a programmer must be able to visualise how scalable the code is,
and in what environments it can operate”. Truly good code is the result of
holistic thinking, Jayanthi says. She finds support in American economist
Tyler Cowen, whose book Average Is Over talks about the future of jobs.
“Take Mark Zuckerberg who, of course, has been a great programmer,”
says Cowen on learning portal 99u.com. “[But] there is much more to
Facebook than that. It’s appealing, it gets people to come back, and he was
a psychology major. It’s that integration that’s important.”
India’s bias for rote learning and lack of application orientation leave
little room for such thinking. “Even when we recruit engineers from the
best colleges, it sometimes takes months of retraining before their skills
are up to speed. That’s far too long,” says Chandan Chowdhury, former
dean (academics) of the National Institute of Industrial Engineering and
managing director of Dassault Systèmes India, a subsidiary of the French
industrial behemoth. As a contrasting case, Chowdhury tells us the story
of his daughter who went to Stanford for a computer science degree.
“They were asked to learn a new language and deliver a project in a
week,” he recounts. “It’s not about learning a specific language, which will
anyway become obsolete. It’s all about learning how to learn.” (For more
on the art of learning, see ‘The Education of Brian Chesky’, page 128.)
THERE’S A SENSE OF DÉJÀ VU
in any story on India’s ramshackle skill situation. By the government’s
own calculation, only 2% of the workforce goes through any kind of
formal skills training. The rest turn to jugaad, the peculiar Indian skill of
can fundamentally transform the economy,” argues Turakhia. Going by
the ICPC results though, revolution via coding is a far cry. “Nasscom keeps
touting that India is a software powerhouse,” Turakhia says. “There’s no
way that can be true if we can’t beat countries 1/20th our size.”
NASSCOM’S CHEST-THUMPING ISN’T BASELESS.
India is producing coders like never before. In 2013, California-based
market research firm Evans Data Corporation estimated that by 2018,
the country will have 5.2 million coders—by far the highest in the world.
Rishi Das, CEO of Bengaluru-based recruitment firm HirePro, says India’s
population of software professionals has jumped fivefold in the past
decade alone, driving a technology and services industry that is on track
to hit $225 billion in revenues by 2020 and $350 billion by 2025, per a
report by McKinsey and Nasscom. They also fuel the Prime Minister’s
catchy marketing campaigns—Digital India and Startup India—which
seemingly wowed Valley mavens during his recent tour.
But here are the other numbers you ought to know: Over 90% of Indian
computer and IT engineers have poor domain knowledge, says talent de-
velopment firm Aspiring Minds, meaning that they lack “the ability to ap-
ply basic principles of engineering to real-world problems”. Little wonder
that not even 2% of the glut of Android apps built in India make it to the
top 1,000 globally. That’s actually a benign problem compared with what
recruiters have to face: A shocking 3% of India’s engineering graduates are
employable (read: job-ready) in IT product roles, less than 8% are fit for
design roles, and about 18% for IT services roles (see graphic).
To be sure, warning signs for the Indian software industry began with
the slowdown in outsourcing, which can no longer absorb lakhs of coders
in low-end testing and maintenance work, leading to oversupply. The
legendary cost arbitrage of the Indian coder is also on the wane. Com-
pounding matters is the tidal shift that has IT firms everywhere scurrying:
Legacy expenditures—think infrastructure, traditional application devel-
opment, and packaged software—will see a 20% to 25% cut, as demand
soars in newfangled areas like the Internet of Things, analytics, and cloud.
BhAVIN> :*TUrakHia
({~CEO, DIRECTI
I T ’ S V E R Y A N N O Y I N G
A N D F R U S T R A T I N G T H A T
C H I N A , C A N A D A , E V E N
P O L A N D , B E A T S U S
Y E A R A F T E R Y E A R . ^ ~ *
getting by. But the failure to gear up for
a whole new world, ruled by specialised
software that is expected to do dramati-
cally new things (see page 112), could be
setting India up for its worst-ever skill
disaster. What’s scarier: The jingoism
around our tech prowess—Indians head
Google, Microsoft, and Adobe, after
all—could be blinding us to it.
The danger is more than just
economic—it’s psychological. The
narrative of post-globalisation India
relied heavily on its rise as the world’s
technology vendor. More recently, the
country has been in the throes of an
image makeover: a cornucopia of tech
startups with Valley-esque aspirations.
The degradation of programming
skills blows holes in that image (and
adds heft to what haters have been
saying in anti-outsourcing forums). It
also signals a potentially huge missed
opportunity: For instance, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics says there
will be 1,240,600 programmer jobs by
2022, a 22% jump over 2012—double
the growth rate of any other job. The
uptake of programming as a career
among Americans, on the other hand,
is slowing. “The shortage of engineers
is a global crisis, and India’s large
engineering population could be a big
hope,” says Naomi Climer, president of
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5. 109 FORTUNE INDIA
isn’t even a conversation. To break free,
Banerjee’s school, which has won awards
for its focus on skill building, is thinking
of dumping CBSE and enlisting under
an international board.
MATCHING STEP WITH
technological disruption is a hairy
problem for most governments. India
has the right person for the job: The
guardian bodies for skill development
in the country—the National Skill
Development Corporation (NSDC)
and the National Skill Development
Agency (NSDA)—are chaired by S.
Ramadorai, former CEO of TCS, India’s
No. 1 software firm. “Programming
is a fundamental skill for everything
from industrial prototypes to cyberse-
curity, and you have to start in school,”
Ramadorai agrees. “But we can’t copy-
paste solutions from elsewhere without
ensuring critical infrastructure like
broadband.” The hope is that kids will
train themselves once they are given the
infrastructure. “These days there are
so many online tutors. Not all learning
needs a classroom,” Ramadorai says.
What about making programming
of Indian women enrolling for computer science courses at the college
level has been inching up, but that’s the subject for another story.)
The lack of preparation hurts industry. “We recruit people from
different streams, not just computer science, and sometimes we find
that the fundamentals are not very strong with people from these other
streams,” says Jayanthi of Capgemini India. Compulsory computer
lessons at the primary level, before a kid is pigeonholed in ‘science’,
‘commerce’, or ‘humanities’ silos, is one way to correct this, but that
British industry body Institution of Research and Engineering, “provided
there is committed focus on quality and professional standards.”
For the media, the quality of coders is far too abstract a subject
compared with funding or valuation. But from time to time, the malady
outs itself. In May, Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal spoke to the Wall
Street Journal about the company’s travails with local programming talent.
Flipkart’s Sachin Bansal tore into him on Twitter: “Don’t blame India for
your failure to hire great engineers.” The episode was a cue for the tech
press to start a meaningful debate, but few went beyond bluster.
Meanwhile, at least one aspect of the market speaks to Rohit Bansal’s
point: Salaries for employable coders have gone through the roof. Peeyush
Ranjan, Flipkart’s chief technology officer and head of engineering,
gives it the usual “investment in talent” spin. Shashank of Practo
acknowledges spiralling wages but says it is only fair. “Coders have been
underappreciated. If you are writing products that can change the world,
you better be paid for it.” Even legacy companies not known to be generous
paymasters have had to increase pay for freshers, and keeping up is
becoming onerous if you don’t have access to big money, says a Bengaluru-
based early-stage entrepreneur.
Britain introduced coding to kids who can barely
spell, partly as a response to tech firms spooked by the talent crunch.
We ask Geoff Smith, head teacher of Kehelland Village School in Corn-
wall, what schools are making of it. There are big challenges, Smith says.
The curriculum isn’t based on the latest industry practices, teachers are
at sea, and infrastructure is a concern. But the policy “will hopefully leave
children with skills that will be valued in the industry. Children also seem
to take pride in the coding projects they have completed,” Smith adds.
Codecademy, an American startup that is helping British schools
build capacity, calls it a visionary move. “Change can be frightening,” the
company’s 25-year-old CEO Zach Sims
tells us over Skype. “But if you think of
coding as the backbone of the modern
economy, the return on investment
is huge. Even if all those kids don’t
become programmers, problem solving
through coding can make them better at
whatever they choose.”
In India’s schools, computers occupy
a limbo. “Most parents are fixated
with making their children software
engineers. We are forever talking about
software being the future. But our
education boards relegate computers
to just another elective,” says Arghya
Banerjee, an IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-
Ahmedabad graduate who founded
The Levelfield School under the
Central Board of Secondary Education
(CBSE) in Suri, a tier III town in West
Bengal. Data from code-learning and
competition platform HackerRank
shows that a little over 20% of CBSE
students at the Class 12 level opt for
either of the two electives, Computer
Science or Informatics Practices, with
an overwhelming absence of non-
science students. (In a rare piece of good
news for diversity votaries, the number
>> Most Indian engineering graduates are unemployable.
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#UNDERENGINEERED
//0*//
//0*//;
//*/;
// 3.2% SOFTWARE ENGINEER: IT PRODUCTS
//IT ROLES//
//ENGINEERING ROLES//
//NON-IT ROLES//
18.4% SOFTWARE ENGINEER: IT SERVICES
35.4% ASSOCIATE: HARDWARE/NETWORKING
7.5% DESIGN ENGINEER: NON-IT
16.5% SALES ENGINEER: NON-IT
11.5% BUSINESS ANALYST: KPO
0 10 20 30 40 50
39.8% ASSOCIATE: ITES/BPO
15.4% CREATIVE CONTENT DEVELOPER
10.8% TECHNICAL CONTENT DEVELOPER
>> Employability %
//0*//1//
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graphic source: aspiring minds national
employability report — engineers, 2014

6. FEEDBACK letters@fortuneindia.com
a part of the skill development framework, often accused of being stuck
with old-world technical skills? “In all honesty, things are still in the early
awareness stage,” he says.
NSDC’s managing director and CEO Dilip Chenoy says programming
is only one piece of the puzzle. “More critically, we need to train people on
using what the programmers build, from smart grids to smart homes to
smart cars.” That also means upskilling vast numbers of professionals—
electricians, plumbers, mechanics—who were the product of a blue-col-
lared paradigm of skilling and may find themselves left out in the cold.
The private sector is getting a move on. Turakhia, for instance, funds
CodeChef, which he claims is India’s largest online code contest website.
In five years, CodeChef has signed up over 2 lakh users who have submit-
ted 6.5 million solutions to all sorts of challenges. Now Turakhia wants
to make CodeChef part of the curriculum in colleges. The plan is to run a
year-round skill assessment programme in the college and score students
at the end of the year. The college can convert that score into credits. “We
tell them that students with better algorithmic skills end up earning four
to five times more than the rest. The good news is, anyone can get better at
it, just like languages or math. Colleges have been very receptive,” he says.
Then days before we went to press, American online education compa-
ny Udacity, founded by Stanford professor and the inventor of the autono-
mous car, Sebastian Thrun, announced that it will bring its Nanodegree
courses in Android development to India in partnership with Google and
Tata Trust. This is Udacity’s first overseas venture.
What will help such programmes gain momentum among people
from all backgrounds is programming itself getting less geeky. “The last
few languages that have been launched read like English,” points out
Harishankaran K, co-founder of HackerRank.
HackerRank also represents the growing breed of coder-discovery plat-
forms that help companies locate talent. The premise: Many coders are
self-starters who may not be found through traditional recruitment chan-
nels. “Also, pen-and-paper tests don’t work here”, says Hari. “A resume can
only state that this person knows Java, it doesn’t tell you how good and
clean the code is.” HackerRank has placed coders in companies like Face-
book and Palantir and raised some $20 million for its troubles.
BUT WHAT IF THE FUSS AROUND CODERS
in idealistic startups is just selection bias? Where’s code in our primor-
dial industries, we ask Chowdhury of Dassault. Couple of months ago,
Chowdhury had visited the Fortune India office to showcase Dassault’s
3D technologies. The pièce de résistance was the Living Heart, a giant 3D
simulation of the human heart. Doctors can walk inside it, study and pre-
dict problems, and prescribe personalised treatments. Dassault says this
kind of computational modelling is the future of medicine and the end of
luck and intuition. Now, Chowdhury tells us about a different world where
luck and intuition loom large: mines.
Most mine owners are clueless about the capacity of their mines or the
quality of their reserves, because mines, typically located in remote areas,
offer terrible visibility, Chowdhury says. “Worse, many miners don’t know
the boundaries underground and get into trouble for encroachment.”
That’s when they get caught. When they don’t, it costs the country thou-
sands of crores. Ask the Shah Commission, which is investigating rampant
illegal mining across states.
In spite of the mess, which has led to
the industry being portrayed as “lawless”
and “out of control”, mine owners have
had it good. Labour is dirt cheap. Prices
were on steroids. “Most of them would
be happy to spend millions on earth-
moving machines rather than efficiency-
enhancing software,” says Chowdhury.
But then came the crash in prices and
the slowdown in China. Suddenly, every-
one is chasing efficiency. Dassault has
just the thing: 3D, of course.
“Imagine if you could make a mine
completely transparent. You could see
exactly how much coal you have, and of
what quality. You could predict safety
issues—before you build the mine. You
could avoid breaking laws. Imagine how
that could transform the industry.”
The pitch is working. The who’s who
of the trade, from Tata Steel, NTPC,
and Reliance, to Lafarge, ACC, and
UltraTech, are clients of Dassault’s
mining software, Surpac for iron ore
and Minex for coal. The company’s
Indian R&D team, which forms the
majority of its 2,000 employees here,
plays a key role in such projects, cutting
through one of our last dark industries.
“Modelling mines is the start. Someday
our programmers will model the planet,”
Chowdhury tells us. “Imagine that.”
ChANDan> :*CHowDhury
({~MD, DASSAULT
SYSTÈMES INDIA
S O M E D A Y O U R
P R O G R A M M E R S W I L L
M O D E L T H E P L A N E T . ^ ~ *
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