Sustaining a company requires human capital—a pool of skilled workers—who can help the product evolve and keep the company at the frontier of engineering technology. The Simputer was envisaged at the first Bengaluru IT.com conference in 1998 by a group of IT (information technology) industry professionals and professors. Due to the presence of a diverse and eclectic group of people, universities have traditionally been the anchors around which such clusters of skilled people have honed their ideas. Indian universities, however, have failed to provide these clusters because of the bifurcation of teaching and research. Higher education in India is in a state of disrepair. No Indian university features in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2018, with Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore sliding further into the 251-300 grouping. In contrast, China has two universities in the top 30 and seven in the top 200.