Media Lab Asia is dead; Long live Media Lab Asia

Almost as hot as the unbearable Indian summer is the Media Lab Asia story—every IT journalist in town has written about what went wrong with this much-hyped venture. Ivor Soans and Srikanth R P try to bring a balanced perspective to the muck-slinging session, but more importantly, are convinced that the future of Indian IT R&D is still bright

It’s a case study in how not to set up and run an organisation that was supposed to "facilitate the invention, refinement, and dissemination of innovations that benefit the greatest number possible of the world’s neediest people." The grapevine was laden with rumours for months that things were not all they were made out to be at Media Lab Asia, the not-for-profit joint venture between the highly respected MIT Media Lab in the US and an Indian government desperate to prove to itself and the world that India was at the cutting edge of IT R&D.

And then the faeces hit the fan a couple of weeks ago. The Media Lab Asia (MLA) team was sacked en masse and new restructuring plans are in the air. These don’t include MIT Media Lab, but the company with the same name seems destined to continue. Of course, the media and mailing lists had a field day—with each party pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. Many had smug, "I told you so" remarks, while some chest-thumpers overdosed on misplaced patriotism, alleging MIT Media Lab didn’t do anything, and how India would now get to the IT R&D moon and back, all by itself.

To put it simply, there were many reasons why the fiasco took place. It was a bomb ticking away, waiting to explode. And it did—right in the collective faces of the Indian government, MIT Media Lab, and more importantly, the people who made up MLA. Some of the reasons have come up in the resultant media circus, others may perhaps never see the light of day. MIT is pretty clear that the change in ministers at India’s Communications and IT Ministry, from Pramod Mahajan to Arun Shourie, was responsible for what happened.

Gunpowder trail

Backtracking to the early days of MLA gives one the best clues on why this project was perhaps doomed from the very beginning. In hindsight, the entire project seemed to have been kicked off in a tearing hurry—only the Indian government put in money, MIT made no commitment about raising money, everyone drew up grand pictures of how MLA would help India bridge the Digital Divide, without any clues on the details of how these lofty goals would be met.

MLA was supposed to be a hub, a glue of sorts that would bind the various Indian Institutes of Technology (who would carry out the actual research), the government (which controlled the purse strings), MIT Media Lab (would guide product innovation and ensure the results of the research work done would be usable by end-users) and the invisible India Inc. (which was supposed to shoulder the financial burden with the government). In short, it was supposed to be a collaborative model, one which Indian IT R&D was not used too—many bodies here are past experts in reinventing the wheel, in their games of one-upmanship in IT R&D. MLA was to bring an end to that.

Walter Bender says that MIT will consider future case-by-case research projects with the Indian government, IITs or other Indian organisations

IITs given the go-by

The IITs were already involved in many projects that formed part of the vision created for MLA and so these were moved under the auspices of MLA. The problem was that no one thought of consulting the IITs here. Says an IIT professor involved with MLA right from inception, "No one asked for our inputs on how this collaboration would take place. No document was even given to us. Top-down was the model adopted."

To add to that insult, while there were three MIT professors on the board of MLA, there was none from the IITs. "We were just asked for reports every month on the projects," the professor adds. Since the projects were originally IIT projects, and the money in any case came from the Indian government, these moves obviously resulted in bruised egos at the IITs. That was one ingredient for disaster.

Salary issues

MLA staffers were paid on par with international civil servants. The reasoning was that you had to pay world-class salaries in order to attract world-class people. But on the flip side, these high salaries had researchers at the IITs and government bureaucrats seeing red. For instance, MLA CEO Bimal Sareen reportedly took home more than Rs 60 lakh annually, which was far, far more than any other head of a premier Indian R&D outfit like the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) or Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was getting. And clearly, managing a huge organisation like ISRO or DRDO was certainly a far tougher job.

Many other staffers and part-timers too were paid extremely high salaries. While the entire salary debate isn’t new in Indian R&D circles, and there have been enough of calls to ensure that salaries in cutting-edge R&D go beyond normal government scales of pay, it was pretty clear that for a not-for-profit organisation MLA was paying far above norms that would be considered reasonable and fair.

Who’s at the wheel?

In the dirty linen that’s been washed over and over in the past few weeks, there have been allegations about MIT Media Lab wanting to remote-control MLA from the US. Some MLA insiders say this was the case, while sources at the IITs explain that it wasn’t so. In fact, IIT sources allege that there was very little interaction between them and MIT Media Lab, leave alone attempts at control. However, it’s clear that some of the researchers were hired directly through MIT Media Lab, and the US-based outfit also had a huge say in the hiring of a CEO, who was an ex-IT industry executive and had no particular qualification to head an outfit that was supposed to lead the battle in bridging the Digital Divide. In fact, some sources told us that Prof Sandy Pentland, who’s on MLA’s board of directors was supposed to spend considerable time in India, guiding MLA. However, tax issues regarding compensation reportedly put paid to these plans.

While CEO Sareen seems to be an object of hate for many MLA insiders, the fact remains that however effective or otherwise he was, the general confusion about leadership and control ensured that no one was any wiser then, nor today. That’s because even today, both camps seem to have an equal number of followers. For instance, while IIT sources allege that very little was done by MIT Media Lab, a researcher at an MLA project in rural India told us that he was in regular touch with MIT professors who guided his project closely. MIT Media Lab chairman Prof Nicholas Negroponte perhaps puts it best, "It is a classic perception problem: each person (each IIT) is touching part of the elephant, but nobody knows it is an elephant. Our work was very diverse and spread."

Adds Walter Bender, executive director, MIT Media Lab, "MIT played a significant role in a dozen engineering and science projects through the mechanism of MLA. It also played a significant role in almost a dozen academic, policy, and organisational initiatives."

In hindsight, perhaps MLA needed a mission-oriented leader like Sam Pitroda of C-DOT, who revolutionised telecom in India because of his skills and background in the area, his passion for empowering Indians through the power of telecom and an ability to hack through the foliage and get to the goal.

The IITs are fully supportive of Arun Shourie’s new plans for MLA’s future and believe that as long as he’s at the helm, Indian IT R&D will go places

Money, money

The initial informal understanding was that MIT would help MLA obtain funds from Indian corporates, using its vast experience in this area. However, MIT didn’t commit this on paper and while some efforts were made by MLA to get Indian IT majors to pump in money, not much happened. According to Yashwant S Bhave, joint secretary and financial advisor, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, of the Rs 65 crore allocated to MLA, close to Rs 35 crore has been spent till date.

With the huge salaries and not much happening on getting Indian IT Inc. to loosen its purse strings, the funding aspect became a bone of contention between the government and MIT Media Lab. And when MIT demanded $5 million for using the MIT name, Arun Shourie, the minister for communication and IT decided enough was enough and pulled the plug on MLA. Explains a source at the IITs: "When MLA went to MNCs they said they were already supporting MIT Media Lab in the US; in fact the MIT tag hurt us because industry thought that rather than spend money on actual research a large component would go to MIT as consulting fees." He goes on to allege that there were rumours that MIT Media Lab was using MLA to raise funds for itself!

However, it must be remembered here that this wasn’t some financial scam, the kind that keep happening every few months in India, ruining the lives of investors and eliciting mere promises of action from the government. MIT Media Lab has been paid $20 million by Ireland for using the MIT name at Media Lab Europe and other governments are also reportedly willing to pay up for the privilege of being associated with the venerable institution. So, even if it didn’t make sense for India to pay up, that doesn’t mean that MIT misallocated funds or was unfair to MLA as far as funding goes.

These were some of the biggest ills ailing MLA. It also raises uncomfortable questions of what MLA’s board of directors was doing when all this was taking place and anger, dissatisfaction and frustration were brewing all around. But in effect, all this is history. MLA in its original form no longer exists. What is the impact of this untimely demise on Indian IT R&D, and what does the road ahead hold? The story on what went wrong makes for interesting reading, and in a situation where it’s almost impossible to distinguish between fact and fable, we’ll perhaps never know what really happened. But what makes for even more interesting reading is what happens now—and that, we believe, is the real story.

Industry-academia collaboration

MIT Media Lab is one of the greatest examples of collaboration between industry and academia. Though the IITs have been doing some great work, the missing link has usually been the part where the results of the research have been commercialised and to get industry to fund research in the first place. MLA was supposed to bridge this divide. Unfortunately, MLA didn’t manage to do much on this front, but in the meantime, the IITs have gone ahead and have made significant progress. Many IIT projects are now supported by Indian industry.

Says Prof Krithi Ramamritham, head of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay, "In the future we could have components related to industrial collaboration; rather than project sponsorships at the level of the MLA organisation. Small parts of projects, for instance, work on keyboards or specific languages, could be sponsored." Going by the confidence that Prof Ramamritham displays when he says that funding is not as major an issue as it is made out to be, it’s certain that the only way ahead in this area is forward movement. In fact, even Bender of MIT Media Lab concedes that the IITs would be able to foster industry-academia collaboration in IT R&D. However, he insists that MLA did make progress in this area too. "Despite the fact that the MIT Media Lab is not continuing its involvement, we made progress on this front in the short time we were there," he says.

Academic collaboration

This is the big story, and one of the areas where definite progress was made by MLA. In a scenario where Indian researchers were busy reinventing wheels, MLA ensured that collaboration took place within the projects it was handling. The IITs are singing the collaboration mantra now. Says Prof Ramamritham, "While the culture of MIT was nothing new to IIT, the fact was that collaboration was not something one could see being encouraged in IITs. But today the IITs realise that collaboration is the only way ahead, and funding agencies too know for sure that collaboration should be encouraged. We are looking at taking a number of initiatives to encourage collaboration between fellow researchers. We plan to form collaborative research groups, which would interact on a broader scale on specific thrust areas like say, nanotechnology and biosensors. We believe this would ultimately speed up the process of research."

Krithi Ramamritham says that the IITs are going to focus on collaboration, now that they know it works

Mission-oriented research?

Another point of view among some experts is that India doesn’t need the kind of ‘kite-flying’ research undertaken at MIT Media Lab and MLA, where out of ten projects only a few reach a stage of commercial success. One expert who was closely associated with the setting up of MLA gives the examples of ISRO, DRDO, etc, as organisations that IT R&D initiatives should be modelled after. To be honest however, while India’s indigenous defence initiatives led by these organisations have seen some success, it’s pretty clear that the mission-oriented research hasn’t done wonders either. For instance, India’s light combat aircraft project has been delayed by more than a decade and the agency in charge of the project is flying a prototype powered by an American engine, with the Indian Kaveri engine is still a long way off from becoming reality. To put it bluntly, success has been limited.

The MLA initiative was supposed to do the very opposite of mission-oriented research and has succeeded in that. Says Bender, "We were asked to come to India precisely in order to take risks and to bring the culture of non-incremental solutions to hard problems." Even IIT sources agree with the view that the MIT Media Lab approach to IT R&D and finding ways to bridge the Digital Divide is the right one.

Opines Dr Sen (name changed on request), one of the researchers in IIT Bombay who has decided to continue work on Media Lab Asia projects, "A technology can only succeed if one is allowed opportunities to experiment. This is why Media Lab Asia was so different as it encouraged a culture of experimenting. And there are numerous instances in history which prove that an industry will grow at a faster rate if there is no control from the government. Take the examples of the Indian software industry or even the cable TV industry—the lessons are the same everywhere. More recently, take the example of the 802.11b spectrum that was delicensed for indoor use by the government. As a result of this policy, one could see many WiFi projects mushrooming all across the country within a short span of time, giving a fillip to rural connectivity."

Hence, though the Media Lab Asia incident is an unfortunate chapter in Indian IT, the lessons learnt from the incident can change the way in which Indian research organisations have traditionally functioned—characterised by a closed door, non-collaborative and project-based approach. Take for example, research in language technologies, which are an overlapping area of research done by organisations like C-DAC and at least two IITs. If the institutions can collaborate together, the quality of work would obviously increase by a few notches and objectives could be fulfilled at a much faster rate. There are rumours that the government plans to play a more active role in establishing collaboration between different IITs who are working on common areas of research. This could be the new face of Indian research where collaboration would be encouraged. Additionally, researchers believe that the confidence level of the government and even private organisations has gone up in the kind of research projects that the IITs do, since this fiasco has ensured that everyone knows what was happening in the projects.

Future of MLA

It’s almost certain an organisation with the same name and mission will continue, going by current indications. The restructuring plan is yet to be approved by the government and is pending with a cabinet committee, but it doesn’t include MIT, and the organisation will have an Indian board. According to high-level government sources, some of the MLA staff who were fired may be asked to rejoin under the new plan, but at revised salaries. Essentially, the Ministry of IT wants MLA to be associated with a number of organisations and not just MIT.

Nicholas Negroponte says the issue of contacts between MLA and MIT was a classic perception problem

As for the projects, they will go on, with or without MLA. IIT Bombay’s director Prof Ramamritham has made it clear that even if the government stops funding, IIT Bombay will dip into its own coffers to fund the project. That exemplifies the level of interest and determination at the IITs when it comes to continuing with projects that they dreamt of and nurtured.

Of course, the IITs will need to become more media-savvy. MLA shouted from the rooftops about successful projects like the Digital Gangetic Plain project, which in fact was a project conceived and executed by IIT Kanpur. The IITs should take a cue from the excellent media and perception management skills at MIT Media Lab and MLA.

As for the people, IIT Bombay for instance has decided to absorb MLA staff working with them into its cadre. Obviously, salaries will be revised, but the interesting part is that all the MLA staff working at IIT Bombay have decided to stick on. Explains Prof Ramamritham, "The fact that most researchers have chosen to stay with us to continue the Media Lab Asia projects even when they know that their salary components would drop by a significant percentage, shows the fact that Indian researchers are now more determined than ever before." A case in point is Anil Bahuman who was recruited by MIT Media Lab in the US, but has decided to stay on with Media Lab Asia, though he had an offer of taking up a job with MIT.

The icing on the new cake being baked comes from MIT itself. The institution says it may not take legal action against the Indian government for using the Media Lab Asia name. According to the agreement, the Media Lab Asia name now vests with the MLA company and MIT needs the agreement of the company (and therefore the Indian government) to set up any new labs in Asia. Perhaps MIT doesn’t want to rub the Indian government the wrong way anymore; perhaps it wants to create an environment conducive to getting the Indian government to agree to MIT setting up Media Labs in other Asian countries (MIT supposedly wants to set up Media Labs in China, Singapore, etc), but Bender is pretty categorical on this when he says, "I don't believe that MIT will take legal action in regard to the use of the Media Lab name."

Even better, MIT hasn’t slammed the door shut on future collaboration. "We are fully expecting to consider future, case-by-case research projects with the government, IITs or other Indian organisations," stresses Bender.

Back to government

The ball is now in the Indian government’s court. The government has to move quickly to ensure that the new-look MLA is up and running soon. That will ensure that the collaboration model kick-started by MLA continues and things don’t go back to researchers replicating what others are doing needlessly. There’s no doubt that there’s a need for the MLA model. As one expert puts it, "Indian IT R&D needs someone or an organisation that can create a vision similar to what Vikram Sarabhai envisioned for the Indian space programme and Dr Homi Bhabha envisioned for India’s atomic energy programme. This is also key to positioning India as a global R&D hub."

Another problem is that the Ministry of HRD wants a greater say in the affairs of MLA, which is what has reportedly held up the restructuring plan. To put this in perspective, remember that the IITs come under the Ministry of HRD. If this turf war continues, things will only get worse.

More than the muck-raking and finger-pointing, getting MLA back on its feet and ensuring it fulfils its mission is what will prove the Indian government right in this ugly break-up. Going by India’s past record in this field, and our infamous bureaucracy, which is fuelled by red tape, that’s a tough call. But Arun Shourie is known to be a man perfect for such situations, and as long as he’s in the chair, you can be certain that there’s still hope for MLA and cutting-edge IT R&D in India.

With inputs from Gaurav Patra in New Delhi and Abhinav Singh in Bangalore