Remarks to the Business Community in Hyderabad

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 27, 2000

Here in India, the number of Internet users is expected to grow more than 10 times in just 4 years. Ten years ago, India's high-tech industries generated software and computer-related services worth $150 million. Last year, that number was $4 billion. Today, this industry employs more than 280,000 Indians, in jobs that pay almost double the national average. Little wonder, as the Minister said, Hyderabad is being known now as "Cyberabad."

Now, I realize to many of you this comes as no surprise, since the decimal system was discovered--invented in India. If it weren't for India's contributions in math and science, you could argue that computers, satellites, and silicon chips would never have been possible in the first place, so you ought to have a leading role in the 21st century economy, companies with names like Infosys, Wipro, and, of course, Satyam.

Again, I want to say that I think Chief Minister Naidu deserves a lot of credit for giving you the right kind of governance. There are some people who believe--we were talking about this before we came out here--there are some people who believe that the 21st century world, because the Internet will make the globe more interconnected, and we will have all kinds of connections with people beyond our borders that we never had before, and therefore, Government will become completely irrelevant to most people's lives. If you look at the example of this State and this city, you see we need a different kind of government. It can be smaller. It can be far less bureaucratic. It should be far more market-oriented. It should be smart, as I learned from the Minister's chart. But it is a grave mistake to think that we can really go forward together without that kind of smart governance. And the Chief Minister's role in your success I think is evident to all of you by your response.

I'm personally intrigued by the fact that you can get a driver's license on the Internet, and you don't have to go wait in line, as you do in America. I have my driver's license here--[laughter]--and in a few months I may come back, because it may be the only place I will have a license to drive. [Laughter] You may see me just tooling around on the streets here, causing traffic jams. [Laughter]

I want to also acknowledge, if I might, just very briefly, something which has already been mentioned by previous speakers. And that is the remarkable success of Indian-Americans in this new economy, from Suhas Patil, the chairman emeritus of Cyrus Logic, to Vinod Khosla, who helped to build Sun Microsystems, to Vinod Dahm, who created the Pentium chip. The remarkable fact is--listen to this--Indian-Americans now run more than 750 companies in Silicon Valley alone, in one place in America. Now, as again I learned on the screen, we're moving from brain drain to brain gain in India, because many are coming home.

The partnership of Americans and Indians proposes to raise a billion dollars for a global institute of science and technology here. I have no doubt they will succeed. After welcoming your engineers to our shores, today many of our leading companies, from Apple to Texas Instruments to Oracle, are coming in waves to your shores. I'm told that if a person calls Microsoft for help with software, there's a pretty good chance they'll find themselves talking to an expert in India, rather than Seattle. India is fast becoming one of the world's software superpowers, proving that in a globalized world, developing nations not only can succeed, developing nations can lead.