ESOP for teachers! Shiv Nadar’s latest formula to check brain
Pragati Verma & Prasenjit Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI
STOCK options for teachers. That’s the latest brainwave from Shiv Nadar. ``Students of information technology leaving the country are bad enough, but talented teachers taking flight abroad is much worse,’’ says HCL Technologies chairman and CEO Shiv Nadar.
And to fight this, Nadar will make teaching in his newly-formed software institute as remunerative as working in a top-flight IT company, by offering HCL Technology stocks to the faculty.
And he has also managed to rope in Carnegie Mellon University for his latest education venture, which will offer masters programme to the institute’s students.
Raj Reddy, professor of computer science at CMU and a long-time member of the US president’s advisory committee on technology, is still bullish on India, despite the Sankhya Vahini brouhaha.
``I can live with delays in a democracy rather than fast work in a dictatorship,’’ he quips.
As far as Nadar’s stock option scheme for his software education institute —-SSNSASE — goes, he has bequeathed a few million shares of HCL Technologies to his charitable trust, the Sivasubhramaniya Nadar Trust.
``And a number of these shares will be used as an incentive for attracting the best of talents for the faculty positions at the software institute. While scouting for candidates for faculty positions, we will be not just competing with other institutes, but also companies, like our own HCL Technologies,’’ said Nadar.
Agreeing with Nadar’s contention that teaching needs to be a much more paying profession for technology pros than it is now, Raj Reddy says, ``Recently, I was in Anna University, Tamil Nadu. And talking to some of the graduating students, I found that most of the fresh computer sciences graduates were getting starting salaries, more than their lecturers. That’s not a happy situation.’’
Speaking about the inspiration behind his philanthrophic move, Nadar says, ``I was greatly impressed by David Packard (H-P cofounder). The Packard Foundation is among the top three foundations in the US. And industrialist Andrew Carnegie too. His wealth, if calculated by applying today’s values, would make him the all-time richest man in the world. And he had such a big heart to bequeath all that wealth to philanthrophy, to the Carnegie-Mellon university, Carnegie Hall and so on.’’
Nadar says that even Indian business families like Tatas and Birlas too have done their bit for education in India. ``The Indian Institute of Science is an example of the Tatas’ philanthrophy,’’ says Nadar.
In the relaxed environs of Oberoi, both Nadar and Reddy talked to ET about philanthrophy and education.
However, with two tech wizards around, it’s impossible that the issue of US slowdown wouldn’t come up at all. Reddy has an interesting take on the slowing of technology spending.
``Technology is a $700-billion business in the US today, next only to the $1-trillion healthcare industry. So, even if the technology sector is to keep growing for the next 15 years, it could be at best a $2-3 trillion industry, but not a $6-trillion one, since if that happens, we will all be eating, sleeping and drinking IT. So I think technology spending had to slow down at one point or other,’’ says Reddy.
He points out that if IBM had kept growing at the 30 per cent rate it was growing in the 80s, it’s turnover would have exceeded the US GNP.
Nadar, too, is not very worried about the US slowdown. ``It’s an inflexion point and the US economy is getting cleaned up,’’ says Nadar.
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