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India apparently claims to be at the forefront of the global IT revolution as well as technology but have we seen any IT innovation from India (not by Indians living abroad) during or after the Internet revolution, leave alone having our own Steve Jobs?

With growth of the Internet, we have seen the concept of email evolve with Hotmail, Yahoo and a host of others providing email services for free.

At that time (in the mid 1990s), email technology made all of us awe-struck.

Messages, and more importantly, job applications along with CVs could be sent instantly and that too for free!

But here, there was no apparent role played by India, except of course Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia was an Indian brought up in the US.

Along with Internet came search engine giant Google and another Internet-platform-cum-email provider Yahoo. Still, there was no sign of India.

The onset and evolving of the Internet created instant billionaires with for example, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, starting Google as their college project at the coveted Stanford University in the US.

Google today earns over $5 billon in a quarter. The search engine’s second quarter earnings touched $9 billion.

Let’s take another example. Late Steve Jobs, who has literally changed the world with his innovative applications, is another success story.

The technology world lost one of its brightest stars with the demise of Steve Jobs last week. Jobs not only founded Apple but also recreated it and turned Apple into one of the world’s favourite consumer electronics brands with products like iPad, iPod and iPhone… names that are uttered by almost every youth of the world.

Another success story is that of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who like Jobs is a college dropout but the chairman of the world’s biggest company Microsoft Corporation.

Gates, who is best known for the personal computer revolution, had been among the world’s richest men for almost a decade.

Then, there is, of course Mark Zukerberg, who with site Facebook, has revolutionised social networking on the Internet.

No one from India figures in this coveted list. So, when will we have someone like them?

We’ve also not been at the forefront of the recent Cloud computing, which has revolutionised the way we store data.

But Indian IT giants or majors (there are four, namely TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies) were quick to replicate Cloud and are offering services at much cheap rates, even though the quality may not be the best.

Instead of becoming a leader in IT services, India has become a good follower.

Thus, our IT industry has to bear the brunt of being called various names. For instance, US senator Charles Schumer called India’s IT bellwether Infosys a “Chop Shop”, a derogatory term used to indicate car mechanics who cut parts from used vehicles and sell them as scrap.

We do have Indians contributing significantly to the tech and IT industries but not India.

For instance, Vinod Dham is known as the father of the Pentium chip that runs on almost all our computers. Would Dham be the man he is if he was in India?

We have Indians at high places in developed countries like the US. For instance, almost one-third of US top doctors are Indians, Microsoft has an equal per cent of Indian employees and the percentage of Indian scientists working in Nasa is almost 30 per cent.

But what if these men were in India? Could we have offered them a platform to pursue their interests and make them achieve the milestone they have reached today?

Indians (in India) have not received a single Nobel prize in the field of physics, chemistry or economics in the recent past.

Also, at a recent ranking of universities and institutes globally, the best we could do is achieve a rank of 187th (bagged by IIT Bombay), way behind even countries like China, Japan and Taiwan leave alone nations like the US, the UK and Germany.

On the scientific research front also, India is a laggard despite its tall claims.

For example, we have just managed to come up with one fighter aircraft (the Tejas, which just passed the trial stages) where as America, Russia, Germany, Britain, France and China have rolled out scores of fighter planes in the last few decades.

But we have made some progress in space technology and that too by collaborating with foreign countries.

Does it take an Indian to go out of India in order to succeed?

Isn’t it time for India also to produce a genius like Steve Jobs or Microsoft chairman Bill Gates from its own soil before flaunting the milestones it has “achieved” in the field of technology.

By involving private companies in research, more collaboration with global firms and less politics in our offices can pave the way, to some extent, for us to carve out our own Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.