From Ancient Wisdom to India’s Innovation Hubs | Kumar Rajagopalan

Good morning, everybody. I have 20 minutes. Probably I can give you one minute to you all. We've been sitting along. You guys wanted to get up and have a quick walk? A couple of minutes to energize yourself? Are you all OK? OK, then we'll start. Thank you, everyone. So one question which always comes into the mind, why is India becoming a brain hub for the world? Every company raising to start their operations in India, be it in pharmaceuticals, automobiles, technology, everything, they're raising to start in India. And the competitors are coming. And many more companies are coming every day. You see the news every day. Even there is one GCC which is starting today. The GCC stands for Global Capability Centers. And the large corporations starting in India. This question always resonates with me when I do my job, because I specialize in the GCC. Is it in our DNA? Or is the question, why is it coming to India? How far should we go to get this answer? Should we go 200 years, 300 years? Or should we go 500 years? My question is, don't look at it now. Look at it beyond 2,000 years. That's how I look at it. So I want to narrate a small story here, and then take it forward. There's a story of a father and son, just like our last speaker, Sourav. The story of a father and son, Uddalaketu and Svetaketu. Uddalaka was sitting in his house. His son, Svetaketu, spent about 12 years educating himself in a university everywhere. And proud of his knowledge, he came back home. He spoke to his father, knocked the door. Father, I came back, 12 years of knowledge. I'm so proud. But Uddalaka did not get up. He asked his son only one question. Son, have you learned that by learning, you learned everything? That question stuck Svetaketu. He couldn't answer. What is that one thing which he should learn? What is that one thing which he should seek the truth, the universal knowledge? Then he didn't enter the house. He walked back. He was walking, and walking, and walking. And probably that walk, every one of us is doing every day. So learning is continuous. Looking at it again, Gita was not born in a classroom. It was born in a battlefield, which means even during the death, you would like to learn. That's the spirit of India. When we look back, it was not just Uddalaka. It was not just Svetaketu. There are many others. The story of walking and learning, and more and more people getting into it, getting back to our friend Svetaketu. He came down from all the way from the north to the south to what is known as Kanchi, Kanchipuram, and then went to Madurai, where a lot of learned people were there. There were sangams, and there were literatures around that. And they started learning about it. One of the prime thing is they not only learned what they learned, they started distributing the knowledge to all of this. So the knowledge becomes the basic ingredient for everyone. And he realized that seeking the truth is important, and the knowledge is very much required, and keep going for that one. The sangam guys are, in fact, slightly different. What they did, they all sat, which is known as right now Golden Lotus Lake or the pond. They sat, and they discussed. Whatever which they sat, discussed, and they wrote. After the discussions, they put all their literatures into the lake, and they were waiting. After the discussions are over, everybody agreed to it, and they were waiting. And whatever the literature which was thrown into that lake, it came up. Those which are coming up, which means that there is a divine purpose which says that, like, this is the truth. Those who are stayed back, not coming up, which means there's a lie, something which is, like, right now in the AI, if somebody has copied it. So which means that those did not come up. They did not want to go through that one. So that was the intensity in which the learning happened. So Shwetaketu walked with him. He saw so many Shwetaketus, so many people walked. What happened after that? So it wasn't just a walk, mere walk to know the knowledge. It was a walk to create various institutions, the sangams. And in fact, if you all know about it, we even created the universities, Nalanda and Takshashila. If you really look at it, even before the MITs, even before the Whartons or Oxfords, in fact, these were there. So Nalanda and Takshashila was close to about, like, 10,000-plus students, 2,000-plus teachers. And many Shwetaketus were there. And it wasn't just students and teachers. In fact, it attracted so many people from outside India. They came down. If you really look at it, like, the Yuan Song came here. And he said that the openness in the debate which was happening, Pahiyan came here and said that, like, the compassion and the learning which was happening. And Al-Biruni stated that the way the debates happened, it opened the eyes of the various scholars and the applied sciences. And Mahestanis called it a true university of its kind. So what it means that India has truly created a university, and that university became the knowledge hub, which is the global capability center for the knowledge. So did it stop there? No. Because with the knowledge which we have and with the information which we have, can we create something truly global after that? Like, how do we apply that one? So which means that the basic ingredients what we had was the seva mindset or the service mindset. So we started with the knowledge. And we also told the world that, like, the service is very important. Whatever you learn, you have to give it to others. The knowledge should produce, reproduce, and it should go beyond the borders. So that was the spirit of India. And when that spirit happened, the knowledge and seva, or the vidya and seva together, created the whole universe. Everybody looked back India. When the IT revolutions happened, they looked back India. They looked back India not just to provide some kind of ordinary service. They looked India as the place where they can probably invest and find out solutions for many of their questions. So when the Indian IT revolutions happened, the first set of outsourcing happened. All these service providers, the large companies here, what you see now, they started providing the services to them until even they could not get their feet here. They couldn't start their companies here. And they were partnering with one of the service providers to get their services out of it. So the case was still worked. And he was working not just inside India now. He started working outside India, because now he has a role to play globally. If you really look at it, all these people, the young lads, when they graduated, they became part of the overall industry. They worked outside India. They became the CXOs and CEOs of large corporations. You know that 60% of the CXO roles or somewhere there are COOs, CEOs, for the Fortune 300 companies are held by Indians, so which means there is something, an universal truth is being searched. And we are the pioneers to that one. We don't want to put the services in place and make money out of it. We wanted to put the services in place and part of to see that what is the truth in it. And that's where all these CXOs could create a wave. And that wave became bigger and bigger. At some point of time, the outsourcing industry was gradually increasing. All these foreign giants, they wanted to start something unique in India, not by just outsourcing. They wanted to see how they can create IP from India itself. When this was happening, in fact, it started in stages. The stage one, it's again called the GCC. It was the Global Cost Center. It was more of a floor-level staffing and providing the services to the world. But the cost centers are most about the back office work. Many of you know about it, the call center work. And in fact, it wasn't a very high level of skills which are required. But it did not stop there, because we know all our engineers, all our people are the spade takers. They know their potential. And they wanted to exhibit much beyond what they could do. And the eagerness to see what's next, that eagerness, the curiosity, and the creativity created the next wave. So the GCC too. What's about the GCC too? From the cost center, it became the capability center. What was truly a work can be done in US or in any other places can be done in India. And if the capability is not there, it can be provided in India. So coupled with the capacity, the scalability to increase that capability, and also coupled with the speed in which it can be done, and the sustained knowledge, and the supply of people, India became the hub for the world again, the brain center. Nalanda was burned. And some people with the heartburns, they burned the Nalanda. But the knowledge was not burned. It was still there. It's part of the DNA. And that's the, my friends, that's the important part here that we carry that one. And the Swetha Ketu's walk of over 2,000 was still running. And now it started running faster. I would say it was not a walk now. It gained momentum. It's running. And the runners right now propelled into much larger vision, which is almost all the top Fortune 500 companies have in units here. It's 19. If you see the statistics, there are 1,900 units in India. The 1,900 units, I mean to say, all these Fortune 500 companies established a permanent presence in India. They create the IPs. They create all the major work, the cloud computing. It can be even the cybersecurity, AI. You name any technology, you name any of the industry, any vertical, all these vertical technology, everything is here. What is the reason for that? Again, I would say the scale at which we do, the service mentality, and finally, the ethics in which we carry that. So coupled with all these things going further and further with the universal truth-seeking mission and the important aspect of binding the seva plus the vidya, we are able to create true corporations within India. This is the fourth level in which companies have started incorporating in India. And not only it's just a back office, it has become an innovation hub. It's a true innovation hub in its size. From the number-wise, it's a $56 billion in 2025. It's expected to raise $110 billion. We are in the crux of a very advanced stage wherein our market is going to be expanding beyond not just the value, not just how much we produce in terms of the dollars, but in terms of the service what we provide. The key here is seeking the truth of how far we can go. That question of Speta Ketu is still the same question. Every day, everyone is searching, and it is going beyond the work. And that enduring work is, my friend, is the success factor for any of the GCCs. In fact, in the last two years, or 30 months, I would say, close to about 140 Greenfield works have been done. These 140 Greenfield works, which would never come to India if we don't have the enough talent. These are not the ordinary work. These are Greenfield, which means that today we are inventing the technology. That technology is going to be there in the future for the world. So we are really blessed to have these kind of innovations happening in India. So again, coming back to the question, what Speta Ketu asked Uddalaka, do we remain just a talent hunt here? Are we just talent providers? Obviously, by now, you would have realized it's not. We provide the original thoughts. We provide the innovation. We provide even new things. We provide the Greenfield projects. We provide every services which is required to make this place truly global. And in fact, we are all witnessing that one. That's the main thing. So again, coming back to this, I'm back to the question. Every time when a new company or a unit is started here, be it in Hyderabad, Bangalore, do we see it's a GCC? Or do we see it's a global capability center? I see it differently. I see it as a Nalanda is reborn, or a Takshashila is reborn. Because earlier, it was a global capability center for knowledge. Now it's a global capability center for the multinational corporations to add their knowledge here. So that's the role India has taken right now. Is it not a full question, full answer, which we got it? That Sveta Ketu's question, Nalanda's burning, has come to a full circle, which is the GCCs, modern GCCs, hub here, either in Bangalore, or in Hyderabad, or in Chennai, or you see any cities which are in India, almost every day it's sprouting like the lotus sprouting in a golden pond, which I described earlier. It's a 2,000-year-old legacy. It's not now. It's the service mindset which binds it all. And the answer to the question Sveta Ketu asked, Uttalaka asked to Sveta Ketu, what is that one thing which you wanted to learn so that you learn everything? And the second question of GCC, truly a GCC, why companies are coming here to establish the GCC? Together, these questions can be answered in single line. For India, it's the spirit of learning and the spirit of applying. Both are happening at a scale, which means that when you find a job in GCC tomorrow, you don't look at it as another person getting into a GCC. Look at you as Sveta Ketu finding the answer for your question, for your existence, which means the answer to the question on GCC, again, it doesn't lie in our future. It lies in our past. Thank you.