An evening with Dr JA Chowdary
Introduction
On February 7, we had an insightful session by Dr JA Chowdary, an entrepreneur, technology leader and innovator with an illustrious career spanning the private and public sector. He is passionate about improving the lives of Indian youth through technology, education and employment opportunities.
About Dr JA Chowdary
Over the last 40 years, Dr J A Chowdary has helped grow the Indian IT industry in different capacities:
- IT advisor and Policy advocate for several Indian State Governments.
- Special Chief Secretary (Rank of Cabinet Minister) to the Andhra Pradesh Government during 2014-19.
- Head of several Indian and Global Industry forums such as FICCI, AMCHAM, TIE, HYSEA, IEEE
- Director for STPI (Software Technology Parks of India), Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore.
- Founder and Managing Director of Global Technology Companies in India.
- Advisor to Universities and Technology Institutions.
- Co-founder of Talentsprint, a leading Edu-tech company in India.
- Co-Founder of Portal Player (Acquired by Nvidia Corporation) - A company that designed the Core Chip & Software that powered Apple ipods.
- Angel investor
- Mentor to entrepreneurs and students
During the early days of his career, Dr Chowdary was conferred the NRDC Independence Day Invention Award by Government of India. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Hyderabad Software Exporters Association (HYSEA) in 2021.
Dr Chowdary received his M.Tech from IIT Madras and M.Sc. From Sri Venkateswara University. He received an Honorary Doctorate for his outstanding services to the Industry from Chitkara University, Punjab.
Currently Dr Chowdary is Chairman of the Blockchain committee at Bureau of Indian Standards, Government of India. He is also Co-founder of Fintech Forums in India at Hyderabad, Bangalore & Chennai.
Dr Chowdary is a member of the IITMAA Thought Leadership Council (TLC). He has founded the International Startup Foundation (ISF) to strengthen the startup ecosystem. Dr Chowdary has also initiated ISF-Gurukul to support fresh graduates and employees who have lost their jobs by offering essential training programs, in collaboration with the industry.
Tectonic shifts
Earlier, there were only incremental shifts like Y2K and Java. Now we are seeing tectonic shifts. The situation has parallels with the introduction of computers in banks. Contrary to the widespread fears at that time, more jobs were created in banks. This might also happen with GenAI. The arrival of GenAI is indeed scary. But there is also an opportunity provided we skill and equip ourselves.
Creating unicorns in India
In the last 30 years, many IT services companies have become multi-billion-dollar companies. They have established a global presence. The CEOs of these companies would come to Dr. Chowdary for various approvals, when he was with the Government of India. He would ask them: Why don't you start a product company? They would respond that it was a risky proposition.
In fact, the reason Dr. Chowdary left the Government was to be part of the founding team of a product company in the silicon chip area. Although many of his friends advised him not to leave the government, he did take the plunge. The team was able to design and manufacture chips which went into Apple's iPod. Later, they took the company public and then sold it to Nvidia.
What this illustrates is that it is indeed possible to create such unicorns in India. We are seeing many unicorns in the Fintech area, because of the world class ecosystem. We have the Aadhar stack, widespread usage of smart phones and UPI.
Education in the age of AI
In the area of Gen AI, we cannot predict what is going to happen. But we cannot just wait and watch. We need disruptive reforms in the educational system. The IT services industry could succeed because the education system stepped up. So, for this age of AI, our education system needs a major revamp.
Millions of jobs are going to be replaced by generative AI. No doubt, new jobs are going to be created. But the new jobs require a totally different kind of mindset and educational background.
To create an agentic product, we need domain knowledge and algorithmic knowledge, with mathematics as the core. But unfortunately, most of the colleges in the last 30-40 years have downplayed departments like automobile, mechanical, civil, electrical. The emphasis has been on computer science and variants of computer science.
So far things have worked very well for us. But today, with only computer science knowledge, students can at best write a program for a particular application. If these programs are going to be written by ChatGPT, or other generative AI tools how do we create the jobs for our engineers?
Dr. Chowdary recalls that there was a time when many people even with an Arts degree would come to Ameerpet and get trained on some of theY2k tools like Cobol, DB 2. They all got H. 1 visa, are now settled in U.S.A., and have made a lot of money. Due to that legacy, many parents even now think that their children should study only computer science.
We must counsel them otherwise. Students must learn the domain knowledge. They must go back to the basics. They should be strong in the STEM subjects and in their chosen domain area. Then, only they will be able to thrive in this kind of era, which will be driven by the Gen AI tools.
Before the famous Kurukshetra war, both sides thought they had powerful weapons. For example, Arjuna had Gandiva and many other Astras. But still Lord Krishna told Arjuna to go and do Tapasya to get more new weapons for the Kurukshetra war. Today, the weapons the students have are not sufficient. They need to upskill themselves.
The importance of data
It is very easy to create an agent for any application today. But if we do not train the models with a lot of good data, they will be of little use.
India has a large population and rich data. But the data is not fit for use. There is lack of annotation and data duplicity. The government, NGOs and industry leaders should come together, create good data sets and enable the startups to have access to this data in some kind of sandbox environment.
The importance of infrastructure
We should also provide to start ups, the necessary computing infrastructure like GPU which is expensive. Then only things will take off and we can dominate the world. In this context, Dr Chowdary mentioned that some startups are even toying with the idea of using idle computing power available in mobile phones and computers (at night) and provide this to the startups.
Building the talent pool
The right manpower is not available. Good people are expensive. And the talent available does not make the cut.
Not only the government, but also, every educational institution must think about creating the manpower for startups in innovative ways. We must design a bridge course where students get a relevant kind of experience and knowledge so that they can work in these startups. This will create more jobs and more wealth. India can create many successful startups.
During the Q&A, Dr Chodary added that we need a Startup mode of learning, not conventional classroom teaching. We should provide experiential learning. We must give real world problems to students, make them collect data, do research and find mentors. We should monitor their progress. After the bridge course is over, we should provide opportunities to these students to work as interns in the startups. These internships may lead to permanent jobs.
Products and IP
India can become a great product nation. Dr. J A Chowdary is very optimistic that in this era India is going to lead the world.
Q&A
Dr Chaudary believes that at important junctures in life, the Almighty has pushed him into the right role. He had not really visualized what was going to happen. Whatever job has come his way, Dr Chaudary has believed in doing his best and being in the flow. He believes in the Bhagavad Gita philosophy: Do your best and leave the results to God.
When he does his Surya Namaskara every day in the morning, Dr Chaudary prays that he should leave the world the way Dr Abdul Kalam left this world while delivering a lecture. Till his last breath, he wants to keep on doing something good for the society.
Dr Chaudary sees more potential in the Tier, 2 Tier 3, Tier, 4 towns and villages compared to the metro cities. Startups can survive only when they are solving a real problem. In the urban areas, most of the problems have been addressed. But in the rural area, many problems are still there to be solved. Each problem is a golden opportunity for a startup company to solve in a scalable, sustainable way. Today, because the Internet has created a level playing field, remote location is not a disadvantage.
That's the reason for this year’s ISF Unicorn Conference in the US, Dr Chaudary is selecting 40 to 50 rural innovators from the schools, rural schools, tribal schools. He feels they are more talented than even their counterparts in big cities. So even in small towns, startups can get good quality, loyal, committed manpower.
Earlier the social ecosystem was weak in the rural areas. Today it is different. For example, during Dr Chaudary’s student days in Anantapur, there was only one small nursing home. Today there are 5- 6 multi-specialty hospitals. Compared to one convent school those days, today there are 6 international schools. So, the social ecosystem has developed in the smaller towns over a period of time. Dr Chaudary’s prediction is that the next set of unicorns will not come from cities, but from rural India.
Consider agriculture. The main problem in agriculture today is labour shortage. One startup company in Hyderabad has created a robot which can do many things. It can remove the weeds. It can identify pest infection in one plant, take a photograph and send that photograph to the cloud. A micro drone then carries a small quantity of bio pesticide and sprays it in a targeted way. The robot can also optimise the yields during harvesting, based on the colour. Using a time-sharing Uber model, the robot can be shared by several farms. So, this kind of startup which is solving a major problem faced by many farmers, will quite likely become the next unicorn.
There are three main issues for startups. The first is mentoring. The second one is angel money at the right time. The third is market access.
Dr Chaudary would not depend on his teachers. Whatever area he is passionate about, he would gain knowledge through proper research. Then he would go and identify a good mentor to guide him and put him on the right track.
A good attitude is important. The entrepreneurial journey is sinusoidal. Dr Chaudary provided a valid analogy. If our ECG plot is flat, that means we are dead. Just like life, the entrepreneurial journey consists of ups and downs.
Many founders enjoy and celebrate when the times are good. But when they have a setback, they start quarrelling with their partners. Instead, they should be mentally prepared for the ups and downs. They should be resilient.
Recall the Pandavas. They faced many problems, but ultimately, they were able to win the Kurukshetra war because they were on the side of Dharma. If an entrepreneur thinks that funds have been raised, the product developed and he is now going to become a billion-dollar company, that will not happen. Every startup should be prepared for up and downs.
Everybody talks about billions of Gen AI agents which are going to be implemented in the next couple of years. Instead of recruiting people companies will recruit an agent. It is easy to develop agents. But the tricky part is training the agents to give accurate results. This will be critical in sectors like healthcare. India, with its large population, diversity and plenty of data, has exciting opportunities for building and training agents.
Dr Chaudary added that even with the widespread use of agents, there must be a responsible human in the loop. From a legal angle, an agent cannot be held responsible if something goes wrong.
Educational institutions should capture all the knowledge they have and build models. They should continuously keep training the model and make it a gamified learning with all the use cases. But for the model to work well, the data will have to be cleaned up first.
In the coming years, recruiters will not be looking at degrees. They will not ask: Are you from IIT? Instead, they will ask: Do you have this knowledge? Can you solve this problem? Degrees and jobs will be delinked. Zoho is a good example. The company works with class 10 and intermediate students and produces world class products.
Cyber hacking is becoming a major challenge, be it financial institutions, hospitals or big corporates. If we can create validated and tested data tokens using blockchain technologies (instead of taking the normal data and creating a data lake within), we may be able to solve this problem.
Thanks to blockchain, tokenization of assets is already happening. For example, we may not be able to buy one high priced share, which costs, say, ₹5,000 per share. But if the share is tokenized and split into some 100 tokens, we can own one small token. Similarly, if our house is tokenized, somebody can buy a few tokens of our house. And it can be traded in the public market. In all these areas, blockchain technology is going to play an important role.
Ultimately the model must serve the public in a very transparent way without cheating them. If we can create that kind of ecosystem, whether we call it artificial or real intelligence, it does not matter.
Today, we are living in a borderless world. Why focus on collaboration only between the two Telugu States? We should collaborate with Pakistan. We should collaborate with Bangladesh. The whole world is one family. Our thinking must be at scale. We should not have a narrow mindset. So, instead of thinking only about the two Telugu states we should think about the entire country.
Ordinary startups don’t have the mechanism to access the data. Also, the infrastructure, particularly GPU infrastructure, is very costly.
We must also create some kind of an angel fund. Many early-stage startups struggle though they have a great idea. Then some sharks come and ask for an 80% stake in the company. The founders will get discouraged. If they give away 80% of their stake, they will be reduced to the status of an employee.
If we can recreate a virtual AI city in the Tier 2, 3, 4 cities, we will see good quality startups coming from even the villages. This way, the rural urban divide will also be addressed. Otherwise, the social fabric of the country will be under threat.
We must work with passion. Criticism is common. We must enable people to become successful and not give up on them. We must understand their problems, coach and train them and enable them to succeed. We should think positively and have a problem-solving mindset.