View: Why Indian techies must first solve local problems

The other day I got a smart card for the Namma Metro. I felt like I was hitting a major milestone in my time here at Bengaluru -no longer do I have to wait in line for a metro ticket, fixating worriedly at the ticking clock before the next train departure, carelessly letting others jump the queue in front of me. Moreover, I now possess a tool that prescribes me long-term benefits of going around the city (at least within the current narrow reach of the metro line).

The card really just stores prepaid value, allowing users to enter the metro with a simple tap. Costing only Rs 50, it is hardly "smart" in the world of sophisticated technology that so many Bengalureans are intimately involved in creating and recreating everyday .

It's the kind of technology that proliferated back home when I was a kid in Hong Kong, in the form of a card called the Octopus, which later spawned the London-based Oyster, among others. Today the Octopus can be used to pay for anything from groceries to restaurant meals; one is virtually useless going around the city without a card. In my biased opinion, a much handier tool than waiting for a mobile payment to load on your phone. Hong Kong is hardly technologically-driven -my father is an engineer, but the profession isn't seen as prestigious -but the common citizen has easy access to better technology that is designed to be relevant to their everyday needs.

Therein lies the apparent technological rift in Bengaluru -engineers in tech parks are churning out cutting-edge technology that is then shipped to be used worldwide but not here.Entrepreneurs, witnessing up-and-coming products and services that are gaining traction in more developed markets, scramble to set up shop and bring the same innovations here, but only to a very limited audience and which the infrastructure has barely caught up on. As an investor once said, How can you fund IoT (Internet of Things) technology here when you don't even have the "I"?

In other words, many of India's best minds are not using their expertise to solve India's own free-flowing reel of problems, instead focusing on making minute innovations for imagined everyday difficulties elsewhere or for the 0.1% at home. That means India's technological renown mainly functions to provide an inflow of income to a select few -a tech population that is large in number but small in proportion -which, other than trickling down at snail's pace, does nothing for the country at large. So where does that leave India, so assured it will reach achche din, somehow, someday?

India needs simple technology that addresses critical pain points in people's everyday lives and that can be accessible to all. I look forward to the day when the next big startup growth story or major funding round is for a product made for the aam Bengalurean (that is, outside the tech bubble).