Reading Comprehension Passage: 33 | 100 RC`s for Government Exams Preparation - Bank Exams PDF Download

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the questions given below it in the context of the passage. Some words in the passage are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.
Over the past thousands of years, we have generated an enormous amount of wealth. Living standards have improved dramatically. It is clear that the key driver behind all of this wealth is technological innovation that started with the ability to use tools.
There are three board steps in wealth creation : invent a new method, perfect it, apply it. Indian businesses and industry in general have generated most of their wealth from the last step, a little from the second and almost nothing from the first. We tend to go backwards and end up with severely limited opportunities compared with those who start from the first step. That is a fundamental difference between Indian businesses and businesses of the highly developed world. Many of the things that define modern life were invented by Europeans and Americans. They created wealth not only from the first step, they also established first claim on the second and third steps.
Unsurprisingly, then, their share dominates the global wealth. The Chinese, Japanese and Koreans excelled in perfecting production techniques; as a result they have managed to corner a substantial chunk of the wealth.
Once things like roads, electricity, televisions, cars, malls, toasters, soaps and so on have been invented and their use or implementation defined, it is possible to create wealth simply by making more of them and selling them to the population neglected by the inventors and the improvisers. That has largely been the market for Indian companies. But they have just not focused on innovation. In terms of valuation, India’s largest companies are in the region of about $40-50 billion depending upon the stock market.
Those companies took generations to get there, and not to forget, many of them were generously helped by what is euphemistically called crony capitalism. On the other hand, a 17-year-old student in the US named Mark Zuckerberg built a company in 10 years that had an IPO values at $100 billion! (Facebook, in spite of a lower valuation now, is still bigger than Reliance or DLF.) Consider Google, founded barely 15 years ago by two students. It now stands at a whopping $300 billion. Then there are more mature companies such as Apple that are worth over $400 billion. These achievements are entirely to the credit of the founders.
Many Indian ‘experts’ in business and finance tend to dismiss these companies as vapourware, paper money, mere websites, luck or even as companies that do no real work. However, if we examine our daily living standards, it would be hard to find any contribution from Indian companies.
Virtually everything around us, from the internet to lighting to healthcare, was invented by the developed countries. If they had not been, we would have still been living in the Stone Age; on the other hand, if Indian industry had not been there, no one would have noticed.
While this comparison may seem odious, it highlights the one-way relationship as far as innovation is concerned.
Government at various levels periodically exhorts scientists and engineers to push the boundaries. But focusing on technologists is like putting the cart before the horse. Innovation is not the domain of technologists. They are one link in the chain. US companies such as Intel, IBM and Google routinely outsource the development of their latest technologies to Indian engineers; yet these cannot be called Indian innovations. In the same way if an Indian company were to innovate and if the work related to technology were outsourced to American engineers, that would still be Indian innovation.
The most crucial element of innovation is building a business case, funding it and commercialising it. That is the domain of businessmen and finance experts; it is also the weakest link in India. There is little knowledge of how to assess the risks and rewards of innovation.