T N Ninan: An I for an I

Doing business for Israel and India is easy because of the enormous goodwill for India in that country

It is not often that you meet a head of state, rarer still to meet a head of state who is an elder statesman with wisdom and special insights. So it was a rare privilege this week to meet Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, along with a CII team that was in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to continue a CEOs’ dialogue. Peres’ mind ranged far and wide. Agriculture is technology-intensive, he said, which is why 100,000 cows in Israel produce as much milk as 4 million cows in Ethiopia. “We have increased milk yield 30-40 times,” he explained. Slipping smoothly to another field, he said “making spare parts for the human body” is the science of the future. He meant stem cell research, of course, and added that Israel is trying to be a leader in the field, having recently replaced a damaged heart muscle by using cells taken from the skin.

Switching subjects again, he got more adventurous. “Why not make the army into a university?” All young Israelis have to serve their time in the army, but Peres said only one in seven soldiers is a fighting man, the rest are in what he called services. “We give them housing, a salary, other facilities—so why not educate them while they are in uniform? Normally, it takes 1,300 hours of study to get a degree. If you do it properly, it can be done in 650 hours.” And, of course, he touched on oil and energy, pointing out that the sun was a more reliable, long-term source of energy than hydrocarbons, and that Israel was investing a lot of money in solar energy research.

The sub-text to these and many other stimulating thoughts was that Israel seeks to become an R&D-intensive country, with cutting-edge technology in a variety of fields. “We are only 8 million people, you are more than a billion. We can’t possibly produce to feed your market…how many shoes can we make, and how many people to make those shoes? Better for us to do the research and create the technologies that you can use in your production system.” Peres was echoing what the CEOs had already discussed, that Israeli technology and Indian production were a perfect match. At dinner the previous night, a former Israeli chief of staff who now heads a water company talked of his company desalinating water at a cost of no more than 3 paise per litre. Then there was the recycling of urban sewage—which his company “bought” and then recycled. Once all the plants under construction come on stream, a third of Israel’s total water consumption will be recycled, and the country will actually be recharging its aquifers. It is easy to see the application of these and other technologies (as in drip irrigation and solar energy) in India.

It is not widely known outside Israel as to just how much the country has become a research-intensive and technology-oriented country—and not just in defence technology (the country is now the second-most important source of defence supplies for India). A single Technion university has 15,000 tech students, perhaps more than all our IITs put together.

Doing business for Israel and India (I to I) is easy because there is enormous goodwill for India in the country, not least because India has no history of anti-Semitism—one reason why tens of thousands of Israelis come holidaying to India every year. The Slumdog Millionaire book, for instance, has sold over 100,000 copies in its Hebrew translation, perhaps more than it has sold in India! All of Amitav Ghosh’s books, Arundhati Roy’s masterpiece, Adiga’s White Tiger, all have a ready and large market. Israelis have discovered India. It is time Indians discovered Israel.