The world is innovating. We have self driving electric cars, humanoids, robotic girlfriends and very soon we could have a terminator that speaks in Salman Khan’s accent. Let us see how India has been innovating recently.

Mangalyaan and ISRO’s PSLV sattelites have been a major pride for our country. So has been advances in solid state made by Bharat Ratna CNR Rao. But, where we have been let down is where we have been doing most chest-thumping, the field of Information Technology.

Before you start shouting, let me explain what I mean by innovation. Business innovation/application of technology and not what I am looking at. This of course excludes e-commerce sites, dating sites or even apps like Pokemon Go. I am not going to discuss on whether Indian startups are innovating, this is a discussion that has been dealt with properly in other threads. Also let us be very clear on what we mean by Indian innovation or innovation from India. An Indian is a permanent resident/citizen of the country who pays taxes here. This does not include NRIs like Sundar Pichai or Sathya Nadella who if would had remained in India would probably be writing code for banking software in TCS. I hate the term Indian-American , are we going to keep taking credit for children/grand grand grand children when they have American citizenship and our country has nothing to do with them?

What I mean by technical innovation is something that fundamentally changes the state of human civilization. Something radical like airplanes, space rockets, computers, google and smartphones. When such a technology hits us we know it has changed the world, we don’t need startup awards or million dollar valuation of companies to know this. So how do we measure if our IT industry is truly innovating. For other fields like physics, chemistry we have Nobel prizes. Turing award is the computer equivalent of noble prize. No Indian has won turing award yet, Raj Reddy comes close. He lives in US and is probably an American citizen by now. I will not categorize him as Indian, please refer again to my definition of Indian.