ESC India, Embedded, India ESC India: Domestic industry continues to struggle

BANGALORE, India -- Inadequate government support, lack of manufacturing facilities, scarce venture funding availability and a culture of conformity are discouraging innovation in embedded systems in India, warned experts at the Embedded Systems Conference India 2011 here.

“An ecosystem for manufacturing is not there in India,” said K. Srinivasan, CEO of Allgo Embedded Systems, based here. Allgo designed a tablet computer targeting the domestic education market, but was forced to use a Chinese manufacturer, Srinivasan said.

Embedded design engineers working for multinational technology companies in India are anxious to shift their efforts to developing products for the local market. Srinivasan, a former Motorola executive, said there is plenty of potential here in certain market segments.

Gopi Kumar Bulusu, CEO of Sankhya Technologies (Chennai, India), whose company developed a platform for embedded system design automation, said the Indian embedded market is expanding despite the relative lack of domestic expertise. “The federal government has to do more, especially because the venture capital model has not worked in the country as far as embedded systems companies are concerned,” the former Mentor Graphics engineer said.
Medical devices are an example of a potentially large market for embedded solutions. A combination of new devices and embedded software could be used to reverse the high incidence of blindness in the Indian population, said K. Chandrasekhar, founder and CEO of Forus Health (Bangalore).

Forus has developed an affordable vision device product aimed at rural areas that uses such a hardware-software combination. If successful, the device could find wide use in other developing countries, Chandrasekhar claimed. “We [still] need a consortium that will help take innovation to the market,” the former NXP engineer added.

The gap between India’s electronics industry and academia remains wide, the executives said, and India’s research institutes have shown the ability to conceptualize new products. Actually making those products in India remains the biggest hurdle. India lacks “the ecosystem to take an innovative idea to the marketplace and nothing much about this has changed in the last 30 years,” said S.K. Sinha of the Center for Electronics Design and Technology at the Indian Institute of Science.

“What we need in India is the creation of a mentoring network, a positive discrimination in favor of Indian companies at a policy level, and incentivizing companies to innovate in India,” added P.V.G. Menon, an industry consultant who previously has worked for Analog Devices.

India’s culture of conformity has also stalled progress on embedded systems development. Experts here said otherwise enterprising engineers tend to play it safe by taking good-paying jobs at established companies rather than striking out on their own.

“This conformity, which is part of our culture, needs to change, but is changing slowly,” said Hemant Mallapur, founder of India’s Saankhya Labs.
ESC India, Embedded, India ESC India: Domestic industry continues to struggle