Necessity is the mother of all inventions

I have been in sales for past 5 years and have got the privilege of working with a variety of clients across many countries. Interestingly there is one question I face from most of my prospects -
Why has India succeeded in software sector and others haven’t? How is India producing some of the most bright and talented software engineers?
Is it because of we have many educational institutes? Is the quality of education really good? Are Indians naturally bright? Are we good in analytics and mathematics (the two most perceived requisites to be in software industry)?
Now we as Indians know that the reasons listed above might not be necessarily true. I don’t think we have the best of institutes. I don’t think we have the best of quality and coverage in education. And I definitely feel we are not the best mathematicians and analysts in the world. So what’s the real reason?
My most common response to all the above queries is fairly simple: Necessity is the mother of all inventions. India doesn’t provide any sort of social security benefits. It also doesn’t provide any assurance on employment. We have to fight for it. From school admissions to post graduation courses to final placements, everything is competition based. Even for a kid to get into a nursery school, there is a selection process (ask the parents who have to get their kids admitted to a nursery school). So from the time we are kids, the parents instil a sense of insecurity in us: Unless we study hard, we may not get into a better school or college. Unless we study hard, we may not get through the cream of institutes. Unless we do well at our respective courses, we may not get a placement.
All who try for engineering (atleast most of us) try for IITs, RECs and the other engineering institutes. Job security is prevalent only for the best of the institutes. The process goes on to higher educations as well like MBAs, MCAs and others.
Only the top 2 percent of the IIT applicants are admitted and to get into a decent department. Almost 2.7 lakh candidates appeared for CAT (Apart from IIMs, 118 B-schools also accept CAT Scores) this year (2008). IIM A alone has seen about 51,000 applicants this year. In CAT, success is awarded to only one percent of the total applicants.
With such kind of statistics and success ratio, Indians have to really try hard to get in. This competitive spirit goes a long way in Indians taking up some of the best jobs worldwide. And the success is not just restricted to software industry but extends to financial services, telecom, and other verticals as well. So that sums up my response in that single proverb I wrote earlier… necessity ….
Before I end, I will also like to highlight an increasing recent trend in India which may hamper our future prospects. Due to the booming demand in last few years (and please discount the current economic crisis), the competition has started decreasing. These days jobs are available for simple graduates (even BAs) in software companies. XII pass candidates with some add-on silly courses have started getting jobs in BPO industries. This is slowly going to decrease the competitiveness within us thus decreasing the quality of output from India. Unless we act now, we might very soon stop facing the queries with which I started this blog.