The tech revolution that wasn’t

In 1960, engineers at India’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) built what they called an “Automatic Calculator,” the country’s first working computer. It had the same type of ferrite-core memory as IBM’s world-leading machines, and at a glance, appeared to herald a new age of tech advances in India.Constructed with a fraction of the resources Western computer engineers had, the TIFRAC, as they called it, was a remarkable feat.“The people working on it had never really seen an actual functioning computer,” says Dwai Banerjee, an associate professor of science, technology, and society, and the author of a new book about computing in India. “You had this ambitious group of engineers building a state-of-the-art machine with very, very, limited resources. The fact they could build this is staggering.”However, the TIFRAC was never even replicated, let alone produced at scale. The visionaries behind it wanted to turn India into an independent computing nation: a place that would produce its own equipment and become an industry power. Instead, the TIFRAC became a technological cul-de-sac, and India’s tech industry took on a very different shape. Instead of exporting equipment, it exports talent, sending skilled engineers and executives around the globe.Now Banerjee explores those issues in the book, “Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution,” published by Princeton University Press. In it, he examines the country’s pursuit of technological self-sufficiency, and the global forces that prevailed against this vision. As a result, the country is “the world’s leading provider of inexpensive outsourcing and offshoring services, yet enjoys minimal benefits from more profitable advances in research, manufacturing, and development,” Banerjee writes.“This book is about understanding how the current landscape of technological power came to be and the unequal way in which power is distributed across the world when it comes to anything to do with computing,” Banerjee says. “Basically, the historical conditions of the mid-20th century period are essential to understanding why the world of computing looks the way it does today.”Computing and the geopolitics of knowledgeWhen India became a sovereign nation in 1947, many of its leaders believed “rapid technology-driven industrialization was the only way out of centuries of colonial underdevelopment,” as Banerjee writes. Some leapt into action, such as the remarkable nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, who helped establish the TIFR.Initially, Indian leaders hoped to gain cooperation for the U.S. and international organizations in making technological advances, but quickly ran into Cold War politics. Computing was heavily bound up with defense matters; India was not always fully aligned with U.S. political interests, so the flow of knowledge from the U.S. to India was distinctly limited.“This is very much an external constraint story,” Banerjee says. “You need blueprints and not just working papers, and that’s what was guarded by the U.S. for a very long time.”Still, the TIFR research team toiled away as its computing projects until the TIFRAC was up and running — making national headlines.“The achievement it represents is mind-boggling,” Banerjee emphasizes. “A computer in the U.S. would have cost more to run than this entire institute in India.”As Banerjee details in the book, the TIFRAC machine was built to grow. Its engineers matched the speed of IBM machines and planned to import larger ferrite-core memory stacks as their workload expanded. But when IBM released the FORTRAN programming language in 1957, it required four times the memory the TIFRAC machine was equipped with. India’s 1958 foreign exchange crisis then shaped the machine’s fate: The World Bank convened a U.S.-led creditor consortium that conditioned rescue loans on the opening of Indian markets to Western capital. Importing larger memory stacks became unaffordable, rendering the TIFRAC obsolete almost as soon as it was completed.“It’s a geopolitics-of-knowledge question, not that they made a mistake,” Banerjee says of the Indian engineers. “They didn’t know IBM was about to reshape software.”Exit IBM, enter servicesThough IBM’s jump forward after the release of Fortran left the TIFRAC project stalled out, Indian advocates for computer manufacturing did not give up their dream. For one thing, they looked around for partnerships and other ways of moving their domestic tech industry forward. And then in 1978, India, uniquely, banned IBM from the country, on account of its business practices.That might have set the stage for India’s computer manufacturing industry to flourish. But at the same moment, countervailing forces took hold, including a widespread turn toward the private sector as an increasing source of activity, rather than public-private enterprises.“For a moment you have this imagination come to a sort of fruition,” Banerjee observes. “But by the late 1970s and 1980s, there is a new group of people arguing for quick profits through software services, saying that this route feels less painful than setting up manufacturing, R&D, and firms for a decade or more.”This turn toward private-sector services rather than government-involved manufacturing ultimately became a decisive factor in shaping India’s tech-sector trajectory. Rather than seeking to make machines domestically, the country became part of the global tech-services sector, while many of its engineers migrated to Silicon Valley and other tech hotspots. Global tech firms used their reach to advance the idea that many countries would develop independent industries. This is not the outcome India’s leaders and technologists once envisioned.“It still surprises me because of the one thing India did that no other country in the world managed to do, and that’s kick out IBM,” Banerjee says. “The fact that this vision fades is part of changing government ambition.”Beyond the mavericksIn writing the book, Banerjee has multiple goals. One is simply shedding more light on the rich details of India’s initial computing efforts. Another is contesting the idea that India somehow naturally found a role providing services and exporting talent; that is not what many people once hoped.Still another motif in Banerjee’s work is that the history of computing too often centers on innovators who are cast as mavericks, shrugging off conventions to upend business and society — whereas the large-scale forces of global capital and geopolitics matter greatly in technological development.“This book suggests we often overplay those stories of individual genius, because you can be a genius with all the right ideas, but if you don’t have all the institutions supporting you, it means nothing,” Banerjee says.Other scholars have praised “Computing in the Age of Decolonization.” Matthew L. Jones, a professor of history at Princeton University, has stated that Banerjee’s book is a “scrupulous accounting of ultimately failed Indian efforts to secure technological sovereignty in the wake of independence,” which “joins the best recent accounts of computing worldwide and transforms how we think through diverse national trajectories through the Cold War and beyond.”For his part, Banerjee hopes a wide variety of readers will be interested in the book — and recognize that the specific case of India and computing can tell us a lot about the challenges of new types of economic growth in many places.“India stands in for a lot of countries in the mid-20th century that had recently gained formal political independence and were thinking of ways to catch up with the rest of the advanced industrialized world,” Banerjee says. “But the power structures tied to technological and scientific advancement did not disappear. They were replaced by newer structures, including foreign policy with very specific ideas about what different countries should be doing with regard to technology. That’s where the story starts.”