1.          The two richest Indians in the world who made their fortunes in the United States through innovative ideas in their own areas of expertise are Sanjiv Sidhu ( $9.8 billion or Rs 46,000 crores) and Gururaj Deshpande ( $7.6 billion or Rs 35,000 crores) , according to the Forbes compilation of the richest Americans in 2000. Both belong to the category of " techies" , the entrepreneur- products of the newly heralded IT revolution in the West. While Sanjiv Sidhu , the Hyderabad- born Indian ( also the son of the distinguished father Dr G.S.Sidhu ,(Rtd) Director-General,CSIR) , made his mark essentially based on his contributions while working for the US based Texas Instruments’ Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Gururaj Deshpande got known initially for his and his colleagues’ work at Bay Networks Group,Inc. on network systems.

2.           A quick look into the US patents literature brings out the following :

a.          Sanjiv Sindhu was awarded , along with his colleagues Subhash Gupta and Frank Vlach of Texas Instruments Inc , an US Patent 5,260,868 dated November 9, 1993 for "Method for calendaring future events in real time".  The abstract of the 30 pages long patent reads thus :

          "A mechanism and method for calendaring a plurality of events such as scheduling the operation of interrelated machines which perform a process flow. Future time is divided into segments called buckets , of increasing length. The first two buckets are of the same size and each of the following buckets twice as large as its preceding bucket. The first bucket slides so as to always cover a specified length of time following the current time. Events scheduled in the calendar is added to the appropriate bucket , depending on how far in the future it is to take place. When the current time equals the scheduled time for an event, then that event is removed from the bucket where it resides. When a bucket has become empty because all events have been removed from it, the events in the following bucket are distributed over two buckets preceding it."

          The invention related to automated scheduling and planning systems immediately found wide acceptance in industry . And naturally there was no looking back as far as Sanjiv Sidhu was concerned. He is currently the chief of i2 Technologies and , as mentioned earlier , is ranked 25th in the Forbes list of the richest Americans for 2000.

b.          Gururaj Deshpande came on the exalted scene through his invention of " System having central processor for transmitting generic packets to another processor to be altered and transmitting altered packets back to central processor for routing " , as described in the US Patent 5,490,252 . This is related to internetworking devices and methods , and more particularly , to a broadband enterprise switch capable of interconnecting a variety of networks with maximum reliability , availability and serviceability. The situation here also was not any different , with Deshpande now being the second richest Indian in the world.

3.          There are now many more " techies" of Indian origin occupying prominent positions in the West as shining examples of inventor-turned-entrepreneurs ; and thanks to the current economic policies of the government of India , the number of India-based technology companies also has shown a steady increase. In other words, the Information Technology Revolution has been slowly sweeping the Indian soil as well. All the same it is also true that whereas the former ones are based on concrete innovative achievements , almost none of the latter, even the most prominent, have so far been able to establish such strengths through even a minimum meaningful invention / patents portfolio. In other words , the native IT sector has "miles to go" to withstand in a sustained manner the pressures of the Globalised Regime. Unless some of these issues are not properly realized and corrective measures taken in time by the government, its dream of a mega IT revolution may simply not happen.