From Y2K springboard to AI wave

With 2024, the first quarter of this century comes to a close. This series looks at India's progress over the past 25 years and future directions. The first part highlights the country's IT expertise, which became a talking point globally as the millennium began

- SHIVANI SHINDE

A recent episode of The Great Indian Kapil Sharma Show on Netflix had some rather unusual guests: Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy and Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal, who appeared alongside their spouses, Sudha Murty and Grecia Munoz.

Widely regarded as two of the most influential figures in India's tech industry, Murthy and Goyal's joint appearance marked a symbolic bridge between two defining eras of Indian technology—one that laid the foundation for India's IT revolution, and the other that is propelling it into a digital-first future.

Over the past 25 years, India's tech landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation, evolving from the Y2K-driven outsourcing boom into a global hub for technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Y2K moment

It wouldn't be misleading to say that it all started at the turn of the century, when India's nascent IT services industry received an unexpected boost due to a potential global computer glitch: Y2K, or the "Year 2000" problem.

The fear was that as the date transitioned from 1999 to 2000, computers would interpret "00" as 1900, creating chaos for industries that relied heavily on computers, including banking. The root cause lay in the fact that programmers had historically represented years using only the last two digits.

Joseph Anantharaju, executive vice chairman at Happiest Minds Technologies, recalls how Y2K remediation costs were estimated to be $300-600 billion, which implied the need for approximately a million developers worldwide.

India's IT sector, still in its early stages, saw a golden opportunity and seized it. The country boasted a vast pool of IT talent, which was not only more affordable than its western counterparts but also skilled in Cobol, a programming language that had largely fallen out of use in the West.