T. V. Mohandas Pai, former CFO and HR head at Infosys now spends a major part of his time on public service, particularly education and public empowerment. He is President of the AIMA, has been heading the education vertical of FICCI and is Chairman of its skills committee. He works with the Government of India on education and skill development, and has been the originator of IT, startup and education policy frameworks for several states. He has worked with both the UPA and NDA government. Here he shares his views on a range of subjects he is passionate about in a candid talk with Corporate Citizen
I was born in Bengaluru, I have lived all my life in Bengaluru. My mother taught at a government school in Bengaluru. She walked to school daily for 30 years to save the bus fare to pay for our education. We didn’t need the money, but mothers are mothers. She was thrifty; she grew up in very poor circumstances in Coorg—there were days when there was no food at home. My grandfather died when he was young. My father was put in an anathashram. He studied at Canara High School in Mangaluru, ran away to Bombay, was a casual mill worker, and served at a hotel in Fort. Later, he became a clerk at Dukes and Malleables in Bengaluru. We were well-off, I went by my father’s car to school. We are three siblings. My mother made sure I did my homework; that we studied well. We had to be first in class. We were voracious readers.
I didn’t want to study Science and become a doctor or an engineer. I chose Commerce, as annual reports interested me. Beginning at 14, I read 3,000 annual reports before I was 22. I had a collection. I could attend any shareholders meeting and ask questions. My father, a shareholder, would get annual reports. I attended shareholder meetings with him.
I studied at St. Joseph’s Indian High School, Bengaluru, after my 7th class. Till then, I attended Vishwa Kala Niketan in Nehrunagar, Seshadripuram, near my house. I completed B. Com in 1997, started studying CA and law at University Law College. I completed CA in 1982, getting ranks at the All India level in Inter and Final (11th and 35th rank). I won a gold medal. I got the third ranking in B.Com in University.
I set up practice after my CA. I got to know Bharat Narang, son of Omprakash Narang, founder of Prakash Roadlines in Bengaluru through a friend. They were starting a leasing company. They asked me to run it. I became the Executive Director of Prakash Leasing in 1986 at 28. I ran it till about 1994, when there was a family fight. I left and started consulting for Pradeep Kar’s Microland. Earlier, my friend N G Puranik, had told me about a company called Infosys, that it was going public. So we bought some shares. In 1993 or so, Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani held a meeting at a fivestar hotel. I attended the shareholders meeting. All the founders were there—well dressed, nervous. My friend and I asked several questions, because they said they would have 100 million dollars by 2000, and 20% net income margin.
"We created B.PAC or Bangalore Political Action Committee to focus on Bengaluru, a political movement to empower citizens, creating an effective urban citizens’ lobby to improve the quality of life. Democracy is a system of competitive lobbies. There are lobbies in India for caste, religion, commerce, but none for the urban middle class”
Nobody then thought the IT industry would become so big, though there was a kernel of a promise. In 1994, I produced a report, presented it at a seminar, saying IT would become a 50 billion dollar industry by 2000. I sent it to Nasscom to Dewang Mehta. It became the basis on which McKinsey wrote a report. Going back, in October 1993, Infosys held an analysts meeting in Mumbai. I went there, asking questions again. By then, Murthy called me off and on. Nandan met me in Bengaluru for lunch at Prince’s Hotel on Brigade Road, actor Sanjeev Kumar’s hotel, with a disco on the first floor. I started consulting for Infosys. But my father fell ill in January. He was in a coma for two months. I couldn’t see him. He died in April. It was a tragic period in my life. I was at Infosys when I was called and told he was no more. The day after the funeral, I returned to work because my father had insisted that work was always very important. Even when my grandmother died, my father returned to work the day after the funeral.
As a consultant, my first task for Infosys was preparing the 1994 annual report. I worked with Narayana Murthy to help design it, writing it with Bala (V. Balakrishnan). Then, we did the employees stock option scheme, ESOPs, in 1994. I designed it. The government couldn’t tax it. It was designed so well. I think the employees must have got about Rs.20,000 crore in all. Of course, when we offered ESOPs, nobody thought Infosys would grow that much. Those were exhilarating days.
Then Murthy came to my room at the Manipal Centre office, saying, “You will be CFO and join us full-time.” I said OK. We did well, set up a campus in 1995, and did the NASDAQ listing in 1995. I was awarded the best CFO in India the first time anyone gave awards. All the big guns in Mumbai were shocked—a CFO in Bengaluru got it! We did everything–investor protection, shareholder relations, disclosures, transparency, anti-insider trading, foreign exchange regulations, overseas listings—these have all now become standard procedures. We did a billion dollars in 2014 in 23 years, and the second billion in the 25th year. We continued to grow. Then in 2005, I told Murthy I wanted to step down as CFO. He said no. But I had joined in ’94; after 10-11 years, someone else should get the seat. I was 47. Murthy said, “Can you suddenly leave it all? Why don’t you handle HR?” I did. Bala became CFO. I hired 200,000 people in five years, built the corporate university in Mysuru, the training centre, trained more than 250,000 people, was head of Finacle, BPO Chairman…
Around 2010, I told Murthy I wanted to leave. He said no. But in April 2011, we made the announcement and I left. I wanted my life back. The stock price fell. People were shocked. Life had been very intense, 24x7, 12-14 hours a day, travel, etc. I hadn’t spent time with my wife, or seen my two boys grow up, hadn’t spent time with my father before he died. I hadn’t spent time with my mother. She is 84 now. People think I left because I wasn’t made the CEO. But I had no such ambitions.
It’s all rubbish—when people say Indian IT employees are not skilled enough. Indian IT employees are among the best. In IT services, they are largely engineers. 90% of those in IT services are engineers and MBAs in sales, etc., coming from the top 20 engineering universities. They are bright, young, highlyskilled, and can learn any technology”
I was on the board of Manipal University for years by then. Ranjan Pai said why don’t we work together and I became the Non-Executive Chairman of Manipal Global Education.
Now, we have 10 venture capital funds through Aarin Capital. We have 250 investments in startups. 2,500 companies come to us every year.
We helped the Karnataka government write the first IT policy for India in 1997. IIIT-B came out of that, IT.com also. We are now helping write Karnataka’s startup policy. In 2004, I started helping the Rajasthan government with my friend Abhay Jain, who got the connection. I am on the advisory council for the Chief Minister, Raje. It’s been a very rich career, a very rich life.
Did I miss Infosys? I have a simple philosophy. Once you finish something, you must never look back. Life is about tomorrow; once past 40, you have less time to live. You must always look ahead, and make the most of it.
When I left, I said I would spend one-third of my time with my family, one-thirds on business and one-third on public service. Now I’ve time for public service and business but family time is when I go home at night! I travel 15 days a month. I am now President of the AIMA. I have been heading the education vertical of FICCI. I am the Chairman of FICCI’s skill committee. I work with the GoI on policy also. I worked with the UPA government, the first NDA government, I worked on a 108-point policy for the NDA government with Sudheendra Kulkarni.
It’s all rubbish—when people say Indian IT employees are not skilled enough. Indian IT employees are among the best. In IT services, they are largely engineers. 90% of those in IT services are engineers and MBAs in sales, etc., coming from the top 20 engineering universities. They are bright, young, highly-skilled and can learn any technology. Upgrading skills is a constant. Please remember, when I joined Infosys, we worked on Mainframe and AS/400. Then came distributed computing with servers and PCs. Then Y2K, the Internet boom, enterprise solutions, cloud. Now people talk of digitisation. Everyone’s worked on all these and survived. All these 6-7 major changes happened in the past 20 years. So what’s the big deal? Now we have Artificial Intelligence, digitisation, machine learning. People can learn because the building blocks are all there. The media wrote an article saying Indian software services companies were behind the curve, not innovative. What people forget is that innovation in technology comes through a few players in the world. And there are millions of service companies which are not tech companies. Accenture, the world’s biggest service company, does not create technology. It uses technology. People should understand that before they shoot their mouths off and all this nonsense that AI will take away jobs and so on. There will be change, there will be automation, but big companies cannot change so fast. They are large, complex animals. Because of automation and AI, the intensity of job growth will decrease. Earlier, if you grew 10%, jobs grew 10%. Now if you grow 10%, jobs may grow 5 %. But jobs will still grow.
Analysts saying two lakh jobs will be gone, etc. talk nonsense. There’s no data backing it. This year, hiring will be 150-200,000. All will be retrained. That is a continuous process.
Of the top-10 software service companies by market value, five are Indian. The biggest by market value is IBM, second is Accenture, third TCS, fourth Cognizant, fifth Infosys, sixth HP, then Capgemini, Wipro, HCL, then CGI. Of the two million employees in the top-10, 1.5 million are Indian. Out of the 120 billion dollars of revenue of all these Indian exporters, not more than 5% is India revenue. No industry anywhere in the world has only 4-5% income coming from the country where it is headquartered, with 90- 95% coming from outside and dominating the world. Any country would be proud of this industry. But in India we have leftist malcontents who say these are cheap cyber coolies. Please! No large MNC will ever give critical software to anybody unless they do high-quality work, and trust them.
People say India’s not created a Microsoft or a Google. I ask, has Europe created a Google or a Microsoft? Or Japan? Europe is 18 trillion dollars in GDP. Why has only America created this? Because America has 18 trillion dollars of GDP and IT spending close to 2 trillion dollars. India’s total IT market is 30 billion. It’s peanuts. India’s not a tech leader because Indian companies are not leaders in technology.
China made it but when it was 5-6 billion dollars, shut out the market to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. India is 10 years behind China. Our GDP is 2.5 trillion. China’s is 12.25 trillion. But Flipkart is competing with Amazon. Its technology is pretty good, all done here. So also Paytm.
Having been in the industry, I have been witness to the rise of a great country, India, from 1991 to 2017, which grew from a GDP 275 billion to 2.5 trillion today, growing at 8.8% a year in dollar terms. I have been witness to a great industry which grew from 50 million dollars in 1994 to about 122 billion dollars in exports; from 30-40,000 people to 4.5 million. That’s 45 lakh. And I have been witness to the rise of a great company like Infosys, a world leader, which shook the world, and did outstanding work in corporate governance. Even the recent letter by Murthy to the board was to ensure corporate governance standards were maintained.
I want India to be a country where every Indian has food on the table, every Indian has a roof over his head, every Indian has water in the tap, every Indian has electricity, every Indian has access to health, every child gets good education, and access to jobs and employment, that the dreams of every mother are realised”
There have been two great influences in my life. One is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi led by example. Murthy says the same—lead by example. Gandhi never asked anyone to do anything he himself wouldn’t. He had a long-term vision, he was a great communicator, a great strategist—look at the Dandi march, Quit India. He created multiple leaders, never hankering after power. He was a prolific thinker, writer and an intellectual. He lived simply. By his own persona, he had more power than anyone on the planet then.
My second guru is Narayana Murthy. After independence, there have been three great business leaders. JRD Tata was a genteel businessman who wanted to make India big, who stood up for values. Then came Dhirubai Ambani who broke all rules but taught India how to scale, to dream big, when everyone looked down on scale. He created a huge number of stakeholders, shareholders, etc. Despite opposition, he fought and became the largest entrepreneur when there were licences, quota, etc. Look at Reliance today.
Then, Narayana Murthy in the 1990s, the man who gave India a global standing, created a great company in the knowledge economy, raised the aspirations of the middle class, taught them good corporate governance, good standards. Murthy is a great intellectual, a great business strategist. Like Gandhi, he’s very simple, very compassionate. Nobody ever asked me about my family, only Murthy. A tough taskmaster, he didn’t forgive non-performance or excuses, achieving all through performance.
Yes, I have been involved with education. We must be kind to India when we discuss education. No other country has 26.5 crore children in school, 3.5 crore people in education, not even China. We produce 2.5 crore babies a year. Around 1947, our literacy rate was 11%, college-going people only 2-3%. Yes, we made mistakes. We have not educated our women the way China did; we are suffering because of that. Educated women educate their children, take care of the family’s health. An uneducated woman, research says, will have 5-6 children; a semi-educated woman 2-3, and a highly educated woman, 1 or 2. There would have been more money for everyone if Nehru had educated women first. Mao said women hold up half of the heavens, and educated China’s women. China’s literacy is 96%. Ours today should be 75%. China’s women’s participation in the work force is 65%. Ours is 25%. India’s neglected its women. That’s why India is still growing slower than China. If all our girl children attended school, if 50-60% became graduates, we can see an unbelievable India.
There would have been more money for everyone if Nehru had educated women first. Mao said women hold up half of the heavens, and educated China’s women. China’s literacy is 96%. Ours today should be 75%. China’s women’s participation in the workforce is 65%. Ours is 25%. India’s neglected its women. That’s why India is still growing slower than China”
Today, 60% of the children study at government schools. Political interference, bad governance and bad hiring have destroyed them. People don’t want to teach English in government schools for political reasons. Parents want EnEnglish, they know upward mobility comes with English. Of course, you must educate children in the mother tongue, as it is the natural way of thinking, whatever it may be, Kannada, Konkani, etc. That is very important. But start English as a language from class 1. Today, it’s the operating language-giving access to further knowledge.
Also, translate the world’s knowledge into your language, you will not get access to all content in your language; hence, no growth. Why do the Chinese train their children in Chinese, the Japanese in Japanese, the Germans in German, and do so well? It’s because they translate the world’s knowledge.
We have many private schools. Out of 100, say 25 are good, 25 are ok. People prefer them, as they are better than government schools. We must allow those schools which secure 10% better results than the state board schools in the previous five years, to expand. Allow private enterprises to establish good schools. Educating a child in a government school costs around Rs.25,000 annually. It’s not funny. Give poor children vouchers or scholarships of Rs.20,000, allowing them to choose any school. We must run education in a decentralised model. India is like a collection of 29 states which are like 29 countries. From Bengaluru, you can’t run anything in Raichur. There’s a huge transmission loss. The UK’s population is 6.5 crore people. So also Karnataka’s. UK has school boards everywhere, good governance.
India has 800 universities, 51,000 colleges and about 3.5 crore young people in college. We graduate 88 lakh per year. The top-200 universities must be given complete autonomy —academic, administrative, financial. You can set them some easy norms to follow. We have the national ranking framework, so all UGC, AICTE circulars and regulations should be voluntary, not mandatory for them. The world’s best universities are fully autonomous. We don’t have universities in the top-ten. Look at Bombay University, Madras University, Calcutta University now. In the 1950s, they were among the world’s top-200 universities.
As HR chief at Infosys, I wanted our employees to become part of a global workforce, competing with everyone. In Mysore, 45% of our candidates were children of farmers, housemaids, labourers, small businessmen. Six months of training, and they became so confident and global. We had to even train some in using the Western commode because they came from simple backgrounds. For that matter, there was a time when even we had lived in houses, 10 people sharing a bathroom. During the training, they lived in AC rooms with running hot water, every facility available in a beautiful environment. After all, they would work in the First World. Murthy would tell us, “We live in the Third World. But they will produce quality work for the First World. So the mindset must be different.”
We trained the women’s cricket team for 1 month at our Mysuru campus - Mithali Raj and others in 2004 or so. Sudha Shah was the captain. The team beat England at Lord’s. She called me, saying, “Lord’s is dirty, Sir. London is dirty, Sir, after staying at your campus.” That is empowerment. When our young Infosys employees go to London, New York, anywhere, they are empowered, confident, not overawed. When you come from very poor countries, you get overawed and think the white man is the ultimate. We must give our people the best the world has so they compete with the best. We can’t cripple people with lack of power.
Yes, I founded Akshaya Patra with Madhu Pandita Dasa (Chairman, The Akshaya Patra Foundation), and Abhay Jain (Advisor, Group Corporate Affairs of Manipal Education) in 2000. I had visited the ISKCON temple with my wife. When I met Madhu Pandita Dasa, I told him what a fantastic job he had done with the construction of the temple. I said, “You have done so much, why not a midday meal for schoolchildren?” I told him the story of MGR. MGR came from a poor background. As a child, he was often hungry. It’s said the first thing MGR did as CM was to have a midday meal scheme for all the schoolchildren. In 25 years, children grew two inches taller, ten pounds heavier. Female mortality, child mortality have decreased. People grew more literate. Today, 42% between 18-23 years go to college, the highest in India. Madhu Pandita Dasa said, “We can do it. But I want three vehicles for food distribution.” I agreed and we raised 30 lakhs. I paid a lakh, my friend another, and so on. The scheme started with 1,500 students, reached 5,000; today it’s 16 lakh. The dropout rates are falling. Students are doing better at studies, more passing out. Attendance has increased. Their health is better. All because of one single meal. The programme gave me the greatest satisfaction after my career. It’s one of the largest meal programmes in the world. The government gives 60%, we raise 40%.
Coming to B.PAC or Bangalore Political Action Committee, we created it to focus on Bengaluru, a political movement to empower citizens, creating an effective urban citizens lobby to improve the quality of life. Democracy is a system of competitive lobbies. There are lobbies in India for caste, religion, commerce, but none for the urban middle class. Further, good people don’t join politics. We started B.CLIP (B.PAC Civic Leadership Incubator Program). In 15-20 years, we want to create 1,500 to 2,000 grassroots leaders. We run six-month and nine-month programmes for them. 240 people have graduated. We want them to become ward councillors. There are about 50- 60 ward officers doing a good job. We want them to contest in the ward elections. It’s working. We also get people to register for votes and vote. In the last election, we reached out to about five to six lakh people, 10 lakh more people voted, the voting percentage increased. We endorse candidates based on criteria, but don’t tell people who to vote for. In the last three elections, Kiran Mazumdar and I have given of-our own personal money. Democracy does not come free. Political parties need money for elections. Donate money legally, then demand performance. When Gandhiji collected money for the Congress party, citizens donated money. Businessmen also donated, but he never did anything for them.
The startup industry got 13.5 billion dollars of funds in 2017. India has 32,000 startups. They created 100 billion dollars of value, employing about 400,000. They are large employers, employing about 100-150,000 yearly. There’s a lot of money coming into the industry. Lesser number –900 or 1,000 - industries got funding. Barring the big money coming into Flipkart or Paytm, smaller companies got less money because people are discerning, they want good ideas.
Skill development should be state-specific and district-specific. Delhi can give grants and funding, but not run programmes because it may not know what’s happening in each state. Skill development should be done by the industry. We need a large apprenticeship programme, where the industry partners with the government, hires the people, trains them and the government pays them.
I think demonetisation was a good thing to happen to India. For 60 years, there was black money and black marketing in India. The system needed a shock. People’s behaviour has changed now. Where are the sinks of black money? Real estate. Real estate behaviour too has changed.
Any dreams left? My dream is: I want India to be a country where every Indian has food on the table, every Indian has a roof over his head, every Indian has water in the tap, every Indian has electricity, every Indian has access to health, every child gets good education, and access to jobs and employment, that the dreams of every mother are realised. And that everyone lives in peace. This country has given me so much - a public education, a great opportunity. It has given me everything; now I spend 40-50% of my time doing public service. Earlier, we travelled out, were treated shabbily, faced racist experiences, had our passports checked, given searching stares. Now people ask, “Oh, you are from Bengaluru?” This industry has bestowed that pride to the country.
By Geetha Rao
