Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution

This fascinating study examines India’s quest for technological self-reliance. Banerjee, a historian of science, tells the story of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator project: India’s attempt, beginning in the 1950s, to design and build a homegrown computer. New Delhi took the endeavor very seriously, and it completed the project in 1960. The government then attempted to forge partnerships between TIFRAC and other foreign consortia to reduce IBM’s dominance over computing worldwide. In 1977, it pushed IBM from India altogether. But India never became a hardware or electronics manufacturing power, and by the 1990s, its technology sector was oriented around providing lower-value software services. Banerjee argues that this failure was not scientific; TIFRAC, he says, was cutting-edge for its era. Instead, the effort petered out because the state supported a single project rather than an entire industry. As a result, India suffered from a weak domestic electronics manufacturing base, meaning that key components for TIFRAC had to be imported. The country’s technical talent was concentrated in a few institutions. Toward the end of the book, Banerjee suggests that India’s current attempt to become technologically independent is beset by similar challenges. The country has scientific expertise but a bad manufacturing environment.