N.R. Narayana Murthy on Policy Betting

Murthy credits independent India's long-standing policy of expanding engineering education with creating the talent pool Infosys could hire from. The post-independence glut of underemployed smart engineers meant smart people were available in numbers, learning quickly and adapting to whatever the global software market required.

Murthy admits to having had history on his side — successive Indian governments, regardless of ideology, kept expanding technical education output. That policy choice, made for nation-building reasons, accidentally created the exact talent pool on which Infosys and its peers could later build a globally competitive services industry.

He credited then-Finance Minister Manmohan Singh's 1991 reforms with three transformative moves: removing licensing (so Infosys no longer had to lobby Delhi to import equipment), permitting easier foreign travel and imports, and allowing 100 percent foreign equity. That last change brought IBM and Coca-Cola back, intensifying competition for talent rather than for a barely-existent domestic market.

Looking beyond IT, Murthy argued India needed to expand software exports but also focus on low-tech manufacturing to absorb the semi-literate workforce, rather than assuming the IT sector alone could lift the country. He positioned IT as one necessary lever in a broader industrialisation story, not the whole story.

Noting India's 40 percent illiteracy at the time, Murthy said the software industry alone could not solve national development. He framed Infosys's success as a partial answer that needed complementary investment in low-tech manufacturing and primary education — candidly acknowledging the limits of an IT-led growth narrative for a continental economy.