We aren't still ready?PE investors? Are u listening?

Taken from today's ET.

WIDE ANGLE
Hunger for new ideas, impatience is still missing
By ANIL GUPTA PROFESSOR, IIM AHMEDABAD

A GREAT deal is said about the strengthening of innovation ecosystem in the country but somehow I still find the hunger for new ideas, the impatience with inertia and a desire to make an imperfect beginning missing. I find really innovative pioneers still suffering neglect and sometimes even contempt. But then the situation is not completely gloomy, some signs of hope are visible. But the alarm bells first.
Having been involved with innovators in informal and formal sector, primarily individuals but also companies, I have realised that great damage is sometimes done by paradoxically lowering the bar, reducing the expectations and being too critical at the same time to promising new ideas. If you wish to have a meeting with a colleague and discuss the issues across the table using a laptop, what options do you have, if you don’t have a projector. Sitting on same side of the screen and looking sideways, bending your neck and later getting it (neck, not the screen!) massaged for all the pain.
1)But Dr Janardan Reddy, a cardiac surgeon who had done more than ten thousand surgeries and has invented a double-sided screen displayed at several innovation meetings including that of Computers Society of India along with Mr Narayanan, a bio-engineer in Chennai, would not get a small support of Rs 45 lakh or a crore, not withstanding the self-proclaimed tribe of angel investors or public programmes meant to serve such individual professional innovators. ( There is no 45 lacs or 1 cr for this one?, PITY, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala , are you reading this? )

2)Abhijit, a former army officer, analysed thousands of pages of digital text in Indian languages and calculated statistical probability of which letter is likely to come after which other letter while typing. He devised a wonderful Indian language light software which does not need a dictionary to ease the typing on mobile is still awaiting funding to scale up his dream.
What is his aspiration? That all mobiles operators and manufactures must enable typing in Indian languages obligatory in various handsets. One would expect that the community of scholars, industrialists and policymakers would jump at such an idea, take it up for rigorous testing and mobilise support for him right away. But no, when I posted it on a list having who’s who of the IT industry involved with this subject, not one colleague responded even with a sceptic remark. What does such silence imply?

3)Another young innovator, Hemanth from Bangalore has developed a software which goes a few steps beyond YouTube and can search in videos, by converting speech or slides into OCRtext and then searching in those words. Doordarshan, IGNOU and many other private and public agencies should jump at it. Sristi will be using it to analyse the videos of village walk, shodh yatras covering more than 4,000 km of distance over last decade and more as a part of Honey Bee network engagement with grassroots creativity. But he is still struggling.

Why don’t we develop a system which responds with alacrity, empathy and genuine desire to produce global and national signatures? Tell me, I must be naive, is not it? Why are weeding out the really creative voices?

My Comments:
My view again come to the fore that we do not supprot innovation.Legpulling is our ideaology.....