The Simputer was the first genuinely original computer that India built. As the legal advisor to the project, I was lucky to own one of its first colour units off the production line, and I had hours of fun with its truly novel interface and advanced features.
For those who have never heard of it, the Simputer was a palm-sized touchscreen device designed in Bangalore at the turn of the millennium, years before Apple turned its attention in this direction. In 2001, Time magazine called it one of the best and most innovative portable technologies to bridge the digital divide in the developing world, but you will not see any in production today because it died a premature death.
For years, I attributed the demise of the Simputer to unfortunate timing. I convinced myself that we had built a product before the world was ready for it, and that was the reason why it did not take off. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was being too kind.
Not only is the Simputer not the only example of Indian innovation that hasn’t scaled, it’s not even the only technology product I have advised that hasn’t.
At around the same time, another Indian entrepreneur, Chetan Maini, was developing India’s first fully electric car—the Reva. By the late 2000s, with about 3,000-4,000 units on the road across more than 24 countries, the Reva was the most-sold electric vehicle (EV) on the planet—well before Tesla made EVs desirable.
This was yet another example of world-class Indian innovation creating a new product category well before global majors. But as good as the Reva was, it too eventually ran out of road and became a footnote in history.
It is frequently suggested that Indians are incapable of coming up with new and innovative products. But we do that all the time—often years in advance of the rest of the world. What we seem to lack is the ability to take those ideas and turn them into commercial successes.
All inventions, no matter how cutting-edge, require investment to make them production-ready. Compaq invested $50 million in the production of its iPaq series of computers at around the same time as the Simputer, but all the Simputer team needed to take the project across the finish line was ₹50 crore— an amount that it could have secured from a single government order of 50,000 units.
nThat order never came, and despite their best efforts, the team only ended up raising ₹4.5 crore of angel funding and debt.
This is the kind of order that governments around the world have typically issued to support the development of new industrial capabilities in the national interest.
The early American semiconductor business survived precisely because the Apollo mission and the Minuteman missile programme bought almost everything that early chipmakers could produce.
This not only gave them a guaranteed market needed to support the fledgling industry until economies of scale kicked in, it also allowed them to develop the process knowledge required to manufacture chips at scale. All of which drove costs down to the point where the technology finally made sense for the consumer market.
More recently, it was a series of Nasa contracts that kept SpaceX alive long enough to remake the economics of spaceflight. A committed public buyer can do what no private investor will—absorb the risk of being first.
Are we not willing to make the level of investment required to take innovations to market? After all, what really distinguishes Apple and Tesla from their peers is their willingness to subsidize their visionary products, often at a loss for several years, until they dominate the market they set out to create.
This is how technological prowess is built. Invention is cheap. That is not where market leadership is established. That is only won by those who build the capacity needed to deliver at scale.
At the same time, it is incorrect to say we have never made large technology bets. After all, Reliance Industries invested more than $20 billion in a nationwide 4G network and then offered the service free for months to win its first 400 million mobile subscribers. This was how Jio came to dominate the telecom space with such speed. Where it counts, we lack neither the capital nor the courage to make bold technology investments.
Indian capital is not timid. We are more than willing to stake a fortune on new paths to proven outcomes. Yet, as significant as it was, Jio was an audacious wager on distribution rather than invention. We could not find ₹50 crore to bring a device we invented into production, but 15 years later, we invested 3,000 times as much in deploying 4G technology that someone else invented.
A country can only ever become an engine of innovation when three things work in tandem: procurement that gives untested products an early market, capital patient enough to absorb years of losses and the courage to commit to something the world does not yet believe is possible.
We have all three, but tend not to deploy them on the unproven. Our capital prefers safe rents to risky bets, and our procurement system is all but built to avoid the audit trail of a failure rather than take a chance on being first.
The next Simputer has already been invented. We need to find it, nurture it and feed it the capital it needs to become everything the Simputer could not be. Whether it thrives or dies, as that ahead-of-the-curve device did, will depend on where we decide to put our money.
The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of ‘The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance’. His X handle is @matthan.