Hi-tech destination for Israel?

India’s Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal sits down with ‘The Jerusalem Post’ to discuss his country’s potential as a business partner

By NIV ELIS
Kapil Sibal shakes hands with Naftali Bennett521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Kapil Sibal shakes hands with Naftali Bennett521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Israeli and Indian governments are working to make “the next decade of our economic partnership about hi-tech cooperation in science, technology, research, innovation and services,” India’s Ambassador to Israel Jaideep Sarkar said last week. Though “the last 20 years of economic relations between India and Israel were about defense and agriculture,” Israeli hightech businesses have more and more reason to look to India. The increasingly educated and skilled sectors of India’s massive population and its government’s efforts to ramp up R&D spending, including incentives from its new National Policy on Electronics, could prove to be a boon for local industry.
India’s Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal, a Harvard graduate and lawyer, traveled to Israel to develop those goals last month. While here, he met with representatives of Israel’s hi-tech business community and political leadership, including Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett and Finance Minister Yair Lapid. As first reported in The Jerusalem Post, Sibal and Lapid agreed in principle to start a fund to facilitate further business ties between the two countries.
Sibal sat down with the Post to talk about increasing trade, the future of IT, and the challenges of developing a nation with over a billion people.
What brings you to Israel? The real purpose of my visit is to renew and to deepen the bilateral friendship that we have. I want to help persuade investors to come to India because of the new policies we’ve put in place, especially in electronics design and manufacturing. We’re offering huge investments in this area. We know for a fact that Israel is one of the most innovative nations in the world. We believe that to translate innovations into goods and services requires the marriage of industry with innovation. We believe that India provides an ideal environment with a low-cost environment and a high-quality workforce. The Indian market is the size of Europe and the US’s combined.
Plus, the next decades will see opening of the African market, and India can be a great springboard for accessing it.
What are the major challenges you see in expanding the trade relationship? I don’t see any big challenges. The only problem is that I don’t think the Israelis have discovered India enough, even though our trade is over $5 billion.
There’s a debate in Israel about how much financial incentive to give corporations to invest. India, on the other hand, is ramping up such incentives. Do you think Israel is more of a source of competition or cooperation for India in that regard? Israel has moved forward, because had the breaks not been given, Intel wouldn’t have been here. Let’s look at it this way: Each country has its own road map of development. It depends where you are on that road map.
I’ll give you an example, we don’t manufacture chips. If our consumer electronics industry is going to hit $400 billion by 2020, it makes sense to bring in the big companies, which create millions of jobs. It will also have a spinning effect because manufacturing will grow. We’re a software power and we want to be a hardware power.
We are least concerned about global competitiveness, and focus on how to take our country forward, and I’m sure Israel thinks in the same fashion.
How does India distinguish itself from China, another growing giant, in this field?We’re not competing with China. We have our own bastion of growth. We’re a democratic country, a very complex country. We have our own problems. We believe that our growth must be within the framework of our democratic traditions. We have admiration for the way China has moved along and, to the extent it has, provided prosperity, but the next four decades will generate the kind of growth in our country that will increase levels of prosperity for those at the bottom of the pyramid.
How do you see electronics and technology in India as a source of development, education and health?We have to leapfrog the industrial revolution and go to the 21st-century revolution. We can’t wait for banks in India to build branches in the remote corners to allow financial transactions. We can’t wait for schools to be built. We can’t wait for services being provided on the infrastructure. So we need to build the digital infrastructure, the broadband infrastructure to reach people. A lot of the development gap will be filled up by providing information technology. I want the farmers to use the ATM machine through their mobile, and not wait for a branch to be built. I want public services available to the consumer through broadband. We are connecting 250,000 villages to fiber-optic cables.
How is India pursuing its environmental responsibilities as a growing nation?We are committed to ensuring that whatever our developmental processes are, they are green and environmentally friendly. The biggest polluter is poverty, so the quicker large masses of people get out of poverty, the better it is – even for the environment.
The Indian economy is being transformed. All of the solutions we’re trying to put in place are green solutions, but that’s not easy for a country with 1.2 billion people. We hope and pray that the developed world honors its commitments to empowering the less developed world with tech and tech transfers. So far we haven’t seen much of that.
Many people around the world view Israel through the prism of conflict. Do you think this has an effect on ties? I’ve heard that some businesses in India are worried about doing business with Israel because they might lose business from, say, Saudi Arabia.
We have our deep linkages with the Middle East, with the Arab world – a lot of our gas and crude oil, 85 percent of which we import, are from there. We have huge cultural linkages that have been developed over centuries with the Arab world, but I haven’t seen any conflicts with our relationship with Israel.
One of Israel’s greatest concerns is Iran and its nuclear program. India repeatedly gets waivers on oil sanctions from Iran. How can you reassure Israeli companies who want to do business in India that they are not supporting the Iranian regime through business ties with India? We have to continue to pursue waivers. If we were not to do that, we’d be destroying the economy. We don’t want an environmental and economic disaster.
India has always helped all countries whenever the situation arose. It is always for reducing tension, avoiding conflicts, and this is the bulwark of our foreign policy. We supported sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council – that’s the proper way to move forward. ■