India: January 2007 Archives

I am fighting between the words "baffled" and "amazed" to describe what I saw today on Google Trends. "Baffled" has a bit of speculation and "amazed" is all happy. God, it doesn't matter. It was cool !!(for the lack of words). Google Trends is a pretty neat service that plots various search request Google receives. Basically telling you how many search request it received over a defined period. I was trying out some of our favourite searches in there raw from (no extra qualifiers). The service also tries to map news stories related to the search request and how it affected the search behaviour. One other bit of information around the graph : where did the search came i.e. Location. One can view cities, countries and even language. Neat han. Now the interesting part. I search for java, xml, j2ee, linux, eclipse and also some odds like ubuntu linux, ruby on rails, phython, php. Well, the graph wasn't shockwave here. If you look at the cities, almost always there were 2-3 Indian cities in the list of 10.WOW. There were times there were 5 in the top 10. Most notably Banglore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi. It was a great feeling in a way but am still baffled (there, i picked the word). Well, we know India in booming in the high tech industry, but what surprises me considering the popularity of google, having a majority share in search request is a big big thing. That to me, means a hell lot of people back home are searching for tech stuff. The baffling part :

• Internet is not that widely used. Its changing but we have a long way to go.
• Not everyone is doing computers. This is relative to a huge large population base. Thus the search request are maily concentrated to only a very small fraction of the people. This would mean lots of clicks per geek.
• This one is a bit sad then baffling. All the cool searches don't have Indian cities listed at all. Atom, Ruby, ubuntu,django. An appeal : Atom Pub is goooooooood, RSS is not.
• It seems only the big brands (in terms of amount of money spent on advertising) have hit a chord with india i.e. .Net and related technologies and Java and gang. Python and PHP not hitting the nail right, which is sad again.
• Is the tech industry that hot in India? I knew it was warm but this definitely is hot.

Answers anyone ? Disclaimer: I do understand the usual caveats of statistical analysis, there are lot other factors involved, dataset is not really connected to the topic in question. And ofcourse, I did not try every available tech search possible but tried enough to get the picture right.

Part II So it started with Delhi, but now you can see it all around. In my last I visited Bombay and Pune, growing metros. Constant influx of people because of the recent rise in IT jobs here. Pollution always a big problem in these cities as the number of two wheelers is astonishingly high (IndiaInfo line sector report). Buying a two wheeler now is super simple, all the bank of the country are out there lending money for any and every need of the janata (public). Credit cards too are distributed like free food packets to the poor. Of course, I can say one thing for the Indian population, credit cards are not just going to work. Atleast not for our generation or before. For next generation (sadly, there is one), I reserve my comments. They are just a whole different breed. Anyways, back to saving the world, i mean pollution problem. So everyone has a atleast one two wheeler per home, everyone commutes to office on that, there is no known concept of car pooling (or two-wheeler pooling, excepts in youngsters and parents dont know about it ;-) ). But the good part is nobody likes that. Nobody likes the pollution, rising petrol prices and the increasing cost of household. Even better government also realises this. So we have a wave of reforms/laws to introduce more of environment friendly vehicles. It all started when Delhi government ordered that all really really old public transport vehicles should either be made CNG-happy or just get new CNG vehicles. Result: Almost all city buses of delhi are now running CNG. Most of taxis too have been converted to CNG. I see in my hometown itself, there were a whole lot of CNG run rickshaws. I was talking to one rickshaw guy and he was the opinion that the new CNG rickshaw were speed machines, he seemed very excited about this part, which scared me a bit. He also mentioned it was definitely easy on the pocket, which is what makes most of the rickshaw guys switch to CNG. Apart from few mechanical glitches (it seems the CNG rickshaws give up early in knee deep waters compared to there uncool counterparts), he seemed quite welcoming to the whole idea, which was news to me. The same is the case in other metros, Pune, Bombay both are following the trend. Now that I am writing about this, I am seeing a lot of movement around this whole thing. [1], hybrids for Indian population [2]. All said, I see there is a lot of traction to have environment friendly public transport and most of it going in the positive direction, there are hurdles as always. But surprising part is it is smoother than I would have imagined. Like in any big democracy (if I know of any) it is never easy to have a big change which is for the good of the society. But this is just rolling right in India. To me the main factor being instant saving you get over using  any other form of fuel. Its just way to cheap. Further buying and installing the CNG kit is not that expensive either. Believe me people, we Indians know our math. I have personally known lots of people who have convinced me on how cost-effective CNG comes to them. I say, way to go. But I have my reservation as to how the hybrids or factory ready CNG vehicles will do in India. The costs are still above the "poverty line". May be as the market matures, we may see some interesting turn results. Keep watching.