Y2K Bug: How a bug helped India strengthen its IT Sector
How the Y2K Millennium Bug gave a major push to the Indian economy
The dawn of the Year 2000 was indeed an exciting one. As the calendar pages waited to flip for a new millennium and the people hoped for a new world, the software industry around the world was in deep apprehension.
The engineers across the world were working around the clock as the economies struggled with a trivial yet powerful software bug. Y2K, also known as the millennium bug was the inability of the computer to differentiate between the years 1900 and 2000. When software engineers started programming computers in the 1960s, storage and memory were an expensive commodity. So, they used the last two digits of the date to represent the year. This means the year, 2000 and the year 1900 will both be represented as 00 in the system.
Trepidation dawned upon many economies as it could send many industries into a setback.
The major industries to suffer were:
• Banks
• Powerplants
• Transportation
The banking industry was in chaos as the y2k problem would calculate the interest rate for a thousand years instead of a single day on December 31. Transportation and powerplants would be severely affected as a miscalculated date could disturb the maintenance checkups and put the environment at risk.
The easiest solution was to upgrade all the systems to store the year in a four-digit number.
Response of Countries around the globe towards the Year 2000 Problem
The USA and UK worked around the globe to fix the issue. The Australian government invested millions of dollars to address the issue. Countries like Russia did not address the issue and believed that it will not cause any major disruption. However, one country that benefited the most was the Indian economy.
How Y2K proved to be a boon for the Indian economy?
As the economy in the USA looked for the workforce to fix the problem, India tapped the opportunity to provide the biggest pool of engineers. Post-independence, the country had invested in human resources and this resource came in handy to resolve the issue. This also took Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to another level.
The comprehensive spectrum of services that the nation offered included a low-cost force of highly qualified engineers. As the USA utilized the services offered by the nation, many Indian companies like Infosys and TCS strengthened their base in Information Technology. Many cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore blossomed into IT hubs via outsourcing their services across the globe.
As per the reports, compared to 1.2% in 1998, the IT sector in India currently contributes to 7.7% of the GDP. Indeed, Y2K has a major role to play in it as this bug attracted foreign attention to the young human resource available in the country. A bug that put most of the nations in distress proved to be a golden opportunity for India. While some may call it a stroke of luck, it was possible because of the commendable efforts put in educating the masses by setting up engineering colleges and higher education institutes that honed the brains of many young Indians.
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
Y2k turned out to be nothing short of a launchpad to success for the country’s IT sector.
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