India growth story is real

We believe that foundation of society begins with opportunity for education for every human being. We not only understand education is critical, but also how education is important for innovation and creating new ideas. The virtuous cycle of society is education to innovation to jobs and opportunities. We attach concrete programmes to these three elements in India and all over. In education, we have one of the strongest programmes called Partners in Learning, locally called Shiksha, to promote IT literacy and enhance classroom environment through ICT. We have reached out to almost 25 million students and half a million teachers across the education system. The idea is to provide them with tools, software, and skills and capability training. That is one of the important aspects of our education effort in India.

Twenty-five million students have benefited and it's not a small number. If you link it with the number of students in the whole of India, then there is still a long way to go. Perhaps 100 million students that you aspire to. We are not just doing it in the education side, there are other programmes that we are doing with the Indian army. We are targeting 100,000 military personnel. We have also have MoUs with seven states-Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar-for improving employability of students in 11th and 12th standards. These are not business agreements. We want people to get access to tools and skills. We don't get any revenue from this though we have our education business, which is more consumer driven.

I don't have anything to announce. But our relationship with first class institutions like IIT Madras is a critical part of our strategy in every country. I can tell you about the innovation labs. The opportunity to have innovation labs around cloud computing is what we are looking into.

Providing free licence software in educational institutions looks more like a strategy to build a large pool of customers in India in the long run. While giving away free software right now, are you building business for the future?

Business from India has some exciting projections for our future. As reported in The Economist, India is going to outpace China in growth. I think this is very real and we believe in it. We do see India as a primary market. That's why we have all these investments in R&D labs. We don't have such things in any other part of the world.