Market Scene : Hi-Tech India? That Day May Be Closer Than You Think : From half a world away, Bombay wizards keep Ma Bell’s phone lines bug-free. The concept--exporting brainpower without leaving home--could help reshape India’s economy.

Every morning, dozens of bright young Indian men and women battle their way through the madness of India’s largest metropolis, choking through snarling, noxious traffic, to reach the front door of what may well be the greatest hope for India’s high-tech future.

The facility where they work is on the second floor of a rather tasteless concrete structure called Standard Design Facility II in a drab industrial park dubbed the Santa Cruz Electronics Export Processing Zone.

But when the young women programmers draped in their traditional Indian saris and the tieless young men in creased pants and white socks pass through the glass-and-chrome doors of Datamatics Ltd., they might as well be entering the “Twilight Zone.”

One group heads down a modern corridor, past a five-foot bronze statue of the Hindu monkey god Humayum, past rows of exotic house plants and into a glassed-in room full of modern cubicles. There, almost in unison, they sit down at a bank of desk-top computer terminals and press a few buttons.

Within microseconds, impulses surge through a half-mile-long ground cable to a rooftop satellite dish nearby, up into space to a transponder on the Intelsat communications satellite, back down to a microwave relay in Spain, through an underwater coaxial cable the length of the Atlantic Ocean, back up to a ground station on Long Island in New York state and, again by microwave, to a large satellite dish in the North Carolina town of Liberty Corner.

Almost before the eager young Indians can bid each other good morning, they are logged on to the AT&T; master computer that “debugs” America’s domestic telephone system; and, for the next eight hours, from their desks 15,000 miles away, this handful of programmers and technicians make it easier for America’s 240 million people to communicate with each other.

Welcome to the world of Lalit Kanodia--a scientist who has dedicated his life to shrinking a world too often at war and saving a nation that seemingly has doomed itself to a future of overpopulation and poverty.

Kanodia, by all accounts, occupies the cutting edge of high technology in a nation better known for its brutal mayhem than its bright minds. And the American Telephone & Telegraph project that his Datamatics Ltd. is now pioneering represents a market potential that could revolutionize India’s moribund economy--indeed, the entire computer maintenance and design industry worldwide.

The market is called computer software export; and with an estimated value of $128 billion a year, its name is far less exciting than its implications. But, in a world where wealthy nations are increasingly wary of cross-migration from poorer ones, Kanodia has found a way to export bright young minds while leaving their bodies home.

When his programmers log on every morning in Bombay, they’re actually entering the AT&T; computer in North Carolina that stores complaints. These come in each day from the so-called “Baby Bells,” such as Pacific Bell, which have continued to rely on AT&T; computer systems since they were created as a byproduct of the breakup of America’s telephone monopoly.

As American consumers have learned, all computers have bugs, ranging from billing problems to snags in the overall efficiency of a local telephone system. Many of the flaws are minuscule, but over time, they show up; and the software that runs the computers must be tested repeatedly, and eventually rewritten to eliminate the problems. Those are the tasks of the Bombay technicians.

Only a fraction of Datamatics’ employees are involved in the AT&T; project, and AT&T; relies on such foreign contracts for only a small percentage of its software servicing. The giant American firm regards such foreign work as an experiment that can help facilitate the “globalization” of communications.

Krishna Tanuku, a regional vice president of AT&T; and the company’s country manager in India, said the Datamatics work helps his firm understand what is needed to service software from thousands of miles away and also how to adapt its products to meet local markets.

With the trends toward globalization--in which a product may be designed in one country, built in another and marketed in yet another--instant communication is becoming a necessity, Tanuku said.

Although it’s a first for India, the technology that made Kanodia’s ongoing experiment possible is hardly new. It is a standard, direct satellite link between Datamatics’ computers in India and the AT&T; system in the United States.

What is unique is Kanodia’s ability to implement that technology in an underdeveloped nation that ranks as the second most populous on Earth as part of an experimental project with broad implications for India’s 850 million people.

“We’ve always looked at people as a liability in this nation--too many of them to progress,” the 45-year-old Kanodia explained one recent morning in the soft fluorescent hum of his private office, where modern art shares space with ancient Hindu idols.

“But people are also an asset. And here’s a way to turn our liability into a unique asset.

“Simply stated, our country is out of sync. It is perhaps the first time in the world when you have an economically underdeveloped country that has a huge bank of highly educated, highly qualified and highly capable people. I don’t think you can find this even among the ancient Greeks, the Romans or the Egyptians.”

His own pragmatic translation: “You can hire 1,000 Ph.Ds here with the highest of I.Q. and develop super-duper products for one-fifth of the U.S. price. And no one ever leaves their desk in India.”

An added advantage to American clients, he said, is the time difference. Because the two nations are half a world apart, the Indian engineers are punching in just when their American counterparts, who perform the same tasks, are punching out, so the debugging and reprogramming work continues around the clock.

“Taken together,” he says, “this has the potential of opening a whole new ballgame.”

But Kanodia, whose bureaucratic battles have helped line his face and gray his hair, conceded that building the ballpark was, in itself, no easy task--particularly here in a city often synonymous with death and despair.

The breakthrough came last summer when, after years of painful lobbying, Kanodia finally persuaded India’s behemoth of a bureaucracy to import a $1-million digital microwave dish that would allow his computers to establish the direct, dedicated link to overseas computers through the government’s telecommunications Earth station.

“No matter how many times we explained it, they just didn’t get it,” Kanodia said, echoing the complaint of almost every Indian entrepreneur who has been maddened by the bureaucracy. “They just couldn’t envision how something in the mind could earn export dollars.

“In fact, I’m still not sure they’ve understood me.”

And clearly, it was a battle that Kanodia never really had to wage. He was, after all, a computer software pioneer when computers themselves were born, and he was luckily positioned in the United States, the nation that gave birth to them.

As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, Kanodia helped write the programs for the first multi-access computer ever built, and he worked on the designs of several other new systems in the years that followed, finally earning his doctorate in management from M.I.T. in 1967.

“I guess I just got steeped in computers at the right time,” he said.

But by then, Kanodia already had given up on the idea of settling permanently in America’s emerging high-tech mecca. Instead, he brought some of it home.

That same year, Kanodia returned to Bombay and started India’s first computer firm, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., with the financing of India’s wealthiest and largest industrial conglomerate, the Tata family. He ran it until 1970, when, in his words, “I suddenly said, ‘Hey, why don’t I start my own?’ ” That year, he founded Datamatics.

His timing could not have been worse. Under the powerful socialist force of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the subsequent rule of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, India had no technology policy whatsoever.

IBM’s pioneering foray into India ended badly, with the company’s virtual eviction in late 1975 after a bitter battle in which it refused New Delhi’s demands that it turn over sensitive trade secrets. The prolonged affair froze India’s nascent computer industry for a half-decade.

By the time International Business Machines left India, though, its presence had made a tremendous impact on corporate India.

“There was such a built-up demand for computers and anything high-tech, the whole industry just took off here,” Kanodia recalled.

Kanodia first signed on with Wang Industries, which is still his largest customer. He describes his long-term business relationship, with Wang and others, as “marriages,” adding, “We don’t want affairs.” The contract with AT&T; came in the same spirit. Datamatics already had been working with Bell Labs, AT&T;’s research and development firm in New Jersey, and both agreed that the data-link experiment would be worthwhile and profitable, despite the $10,000 a month the Indian government is charging for the telecommunications link.

The link is far cheaper than physically moving Kanodia’s technicians to America, and Kanodia and other computer experts insist that there is something in “the Indian mind” that makes Indians particularly suited to the repetitious logical exercises involved in debugging and programming computers.

“Indians are very good desk workers,” Kanodia said. “Indians are very logical. And Indians are very good statisticians. Software meshes very well with the Indian psyche.”

Kanodia is reminded of the chaos and anarchy that swirl around the Datamatics complex each day, and also of the fact that alongside the direct-satellite linkup is the antique, circa-1890 model telephone switchboard that the company uses for internal communications. “Of course it’s a dichotomy,” he says. “It’s a paradox.

“India’s per-capita income is in the bottom 10% in the world. And yet this is a high-tech company filled with highly educated people.”

Datamatics has not only grown to 700 highly skilled employees but has also managed to keep them despite the massive brain-drain that has robbed India of such talent.

Vikram Shah, Kanodia’s hand-picked president for software exports, is a case in point. He has a master’s in computer science from Cal Berkeley and was earning $24,000 a year--a fortune for an Indian in 1976--working for Microdata Corp. in Orange County when Kanodia persuaded him to come home and work for him in Bombay for $150 a month.

“I didn’t come for the money; I came for the challenge,” he said. “And that’s where things like this new satellite link come in. If I stayed in America, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing here.”

Encouraged by such enthusiasm from his own staff, Kanodia conceded that he often finds himself describing his work as having “the potential to do for India what consumer electronics did for Japan.”

But then, just as quickly, Indian reality reappeared. His desk phone rang, and he couldn’t hear his own company’s president speaking from a few offices away. Kanodia’s smile faded a bit as he hung up.

“I mean, here we are, hooked up to the rest of the world, able to access and contribute to all the knowledge on Earth, and I still can’t get through to the next office.”