Some thoughts on Silicon Valley of India

People compare Bangalore to Silicon Valley in California. Silicon Valley in the US, is a place where innovation rule the show. Companies like Intel, Google, HP, Xerox brought innovative products to the market which profoundly affected the way people live in this world. Its all about startups. Research and innovation is the key. On the other hand, Bangalore is best known for its IT Services. IT services, although brings in lots of jobs in India, is far from something which could be called "innovative". I havent heard much about Indian Software companies that makes products like Microsoft. Its more like "manual work" outsourced to India, to tap in cheap labor. This is further reiterated by the BPO industry in India. I am definitely not against IT services or BPO industry. They bring in lots of jobs and good standard of living to people. Without that, most of our engineers would be unemployed (I used to work in IT Service industry). But this is a "service" sector and because of that our economy is highly dependent on the economies to whome we provide "service". This was clearly seen during the economic slump in the west in 2001-2003 time frame, where there were literally no jobs in IT Industry in Bangalore. A repeat of that would be devastating.

I have heard of people speculating that the next "internet like revolution" is in Bioinformatics and Genomics. We have missed the Electronics Revolution in the 70's, we are providing "service" in the internet revolution. Lets hope we do more intellectual work and bring in innovative products/solutions in the next big wave - Bioinformatics and Genomics industry. I hope one day, there is something called "Indian Dream" and many people open startups in pursuing this dream.