Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s parents wanted him to be an IAS, but…

Receiving Padma Vibhushan from Prez Pratibha Patil (May 5, 2008)

CO-FOUNDER of Infosys and one of leading IT czars in India, NR Narayana Murthy, has said his parents wanted him to be a civil servant. "When I was a high school student, my parents wanted me to clear the IAS examination and become a civil servant," Murthy writes in a special edition of a…
financial daily, Business Standard. Murthy has further written that all his friends aspired to become “a deputy commissioner in one or the other of the nine districts of Mysore”.
An M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Murthy however chose to work in a computer firm, Patni Computer Systems in Pune, before starting Infosys in 1981. To give a sense of what Murthy finally created, here are some statistics: Infosys is the third-largest Indian IT services company in terms of revenues of 2014, and its market capitalisation is Rs 2.18 lakh crore when the stock market opened on Tuesday. And this Bangalore-head-quartered company employs a total of 160,405 employees as of March 31, 2014.
As Murthy has articulated in the article, the main job creator in pre-1991 era was the government as there was hardly any private sector unit then. When he joined an engineering college in 1962, he had to pursue one of the three streams only -- civil, electrical and mechanical. He pursued electrical. Infosys now has 25,000 engineers, and as someone who has access to the data, Murthy emphatically makes a point that the quality of recruitment today is worse than what it used to be 20 years ago.
Calling 1991 a watershed year for India, Murthy writes how till that year, most decisions for an Indian corporation were actually made by bureaucrats sitting in Delhi, and in some cases bureaucrats sitting in state capitals. But post-liberalisation, decisions of a company have been taken by board of directors only after a lot of debate and discussion.
So, if not IAS, what is the prime career option for young Indians now? “Today, brightest ambition of youngsters is to become entrepreneurs. We have come a long way indeed,” he writes.