Investing in people

CHENNAI – Outside the main entrance to the Satish Dhawan Space Center near this South Indian city, a goat is chased away by a dog. Nearby, cows and chickens roam.

The rustic setting belies the emphasis on high-tech research and development, which has allowed India to become a member of the nuclear club and one of the few countries that can launch satellites into space.

Since the first successful launch on April 18, 1983, the space center, which handles India’s civilian space program, has staged 37 satellite launches. Two were failures, but the Indians are unfazed.

“Failures are stepping stones to success,” engineer Viswanadha Sharma told me when I visited the space center last week.

The latest launch was staged last Wednesday, for a remote sensing satellite for the European Space Agency. The center is now preparing for six launches in December, five of them for foreign customers.

India is the second developing country after China to launch a civilian satellite. The principal objective, according to the space center’s deputy director V. Seshagiri Rao, is to let ordinary Indians benefit from their country’s own access to space.

Civilian satellites are used for, among other things, weather forecasting and environmental monitoring, disaster management, agriculture, communications, tele-medicine, tele-education, and banking interconnection.

“We should not be dependent on other countries to launch a satellite into space,” Rao said.

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To develop talent for its nuclear power and space program, India puts emphasis on public education. Priority is also given to health care.

In Chennai, the landscape is dotted not with huge shopping malls, but with educational institutions and hospitals.

It seems there’s a health center in this city for every medical condition, from cancer treatment to kidney transplant to traditional ayurvedic healing. One center offers “multi-organ harvesting.”

Across the six-lane road that runs parallel to scenic Marina Beach – said to be the second longest urban beach in the world – the bayfront villas built by the British have been converted not into hotels but into higher learning institutions.

Locals told me that children used to go to Marina Beach to collect seashells. The day after Christmas in 2004, people went to the beach to collect their children, as the killer Indian Ocean tsunami rolled into the Bay of Bengal and slammed into the state of Tamil Nadu.

About 10,000 people were killed in the state, with Chennai – the capital city once called Madras – losing 60 people, all of them children.

I read the story of the seashells after the tsunami. Perhaps catharsis comes with constant retelling.

Judging from the dense crowd on the beach when I visited late last week upon my arrival in this city, the horror of the tsunami has receded. Instead of building sandcastles, people fashioned mini shrines out of rocks, leaves and flowers, offering these to Lord Ganesh, Hindu god of wisdom and prosperity, whose feast was being celebrated in Tamil Nadu.

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The flower business thrives in this city. Women wear long jasmine garlands in their hair. Motorists drape the leis over rearview mirrors and miniature Ganesh icons, turning the flowers into pleasant natural air fresheners.

Tradition stands out alongside health and education in this city. The emphasis on educating healthy citizens has surely contributed to the progress of Tamil Nadu.

India is one of the world’s largest sources of professionals in information and communication technology. It has a robust local pharmaceutical industry, from which the Philippines sources many generic drugs.

The downside, I was told, was that farms now lie fallow because young Indians prefer to work in IT, health care, scientific R&D and other high-paying sectors. Income from a farm averages 200 rupees a day, compared to 2,000 to 3,000 rupees daily in IT.

Apart from state priority given to education and public health, people in Tamil Nadu have many safety nets provided by the state. Among these are free laptops for schoolchildren from grades 10 to 12, free mass transportation for all students up to 12th grade and for senior citizens, and 30 kilos of rice a month for poor families. The unemployed get 500 rupees a month. Upon marriage, a woman receives 100,000 rupees worth of appliances and four grams of gold.

The private sector is also pitching in to ease poverty. The Tata Group, India’s largest industrial conglomerate, contributes $100 million a year to social welfare, including foreign scholarships for science and engineering.

About 66 percent of equity capital in Tata Sons is held by philanthropic trusts endowed by the Tata family. R. Siddharthan, global operations head of the government business unit of Tata Consultancy Services, told me that the Tata Group, for example, operates a 10,500-bed charity hospital in Calcutta, which offers 100 percent free services including treatment and confinement for cancer. The hospital also treats an average of 10,000 out-patients daily, Siddharthan said.

Tata Consultancy opened an ultra-modern complex here in Chennai in 2007. Designed like a butterfly, the complex employs 24,000 people.

Siddharthan emphasizes that the company funnels much of its profits back to Indian society, where income disparities are glaring.

The story of Tata, like India’s space program, is a source of national pride. Tata has acquired controlling stakes in Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo trucks, Timex, 8 O’Clock Coffee, Tetley Tea, Ritz Carlton Boston and Citigroup Global Services Ltd. You know Tata from its Nano, at $2,500 per unit the world’s most affordable car.

“We are not just an Indian company anymore. We are now a global company,” Siddharthan said. “The name sells on its own. It it’s Tata, you can buy the product with your eyes closed... there is value. There is no compromise on the brand name.”

That sounds like a good objective for India itself. With the country’s investment in its most precious resource – its people – the objective can be achieved.