English Quiz for IBPS Clerk 2015 – Set 3

Over the past thousands of years,
we have generated an enormous amount of wealth. Living standards have improved
dramatically. It is clear that the key driver behind all of this wealth is
technological innovation that started with the ability to use tools. There are
three broad steps in wealth creation: invent a new method, perfect it, apply
it. Indian businesses and industry in general have generated most of their
wealth from the last step, a little from the second and almost nothing from the
first. We tend to go backwards and end up with severely limited opportunities
compared with those who start from the first step. That is a fundamental
difference between Indian businesses and businesses of the highly developed
world. Many of the things that define modern life were invented by Europeans
and Americans. They created wealth not only from the first step, they also
established first claim on the second and third steps. Unsurprisingly, then,
their share dominates the global wealth. The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans
excelled in perfecting production techniques; as a result they have managed to
corner a substantial chunk of the
wealth. Once things like roads, electricity, televisions, cars, malls,
toasters, soaps and so on have been invented and their use or implementation
defined, it is possible to create wealth simply by making more of them and
selling them to the population neglected by the inventors and the improvisers.
That has largely been the market for Indian companies. But they have just not
focused on innovation. In terms of valuation, India’s largest companies are in
the region of about $40-45 billion depending upon the stock market. Those
companies took generations to get there, and not to forget, many of them were
generously helped by what is euphemistically called crony capitalism. On the other hand, a 17-year-old student in the
US named Mark Zuckerberg built a company in 10 years that had an IPO valued at
$100 billion! (Facebook, in spite of a lower valuation now, is still bigger
than Reliance or DLF.) Consider Google, founded barely 15 years ago by two students. It now stands at a whopping
$300 billion. Then there are more mature companies such as Apple that are worth
over $400 billion. These achievements are entirely to the credit of the
founders. Many Indian ‘experts’ in business and finance tend to dismiss these
companies as vaporware, paper money, mere websites, luck or even as companies
that do no real work. However, if we examine our daily living standards, it
would be hard to find any contribution from Indian companies. Virtually
everything around us, from the internet to lighting to healthcare, was invented
by the developed countries. If they had not been, we would have still been
living in the Stone Age; on the other hand, if Indian industry had not been
there, no one would have noticed. While this comparison may seem odious, it highlights the one-way
relationship as far as innovation is concerned. Government at various levels
periodically exhorts scientists and
engineers to push the boundaries. But focusing on technologists is like putting
the cart before the horse. Innovation is not the domain of technologists. They
are one link in the chain. US companies such as Intel, IBM and Google routinely
outsource the development of their latest technologies to Indian engineers; yet
these cannot be called Indian innovations. In the same way if an Indian company
were to innovate and if the work related to technology were outsourced to
American engineers, that would still be Indian innovation. The most crucial
element of innovation is building a business case, funding it and commercializing
it. That is the domain of businessmen and finance experts; it is also the
weakest link in India. There is little knowledge of how to assess the risks and
rewards of innovation.