How India Said Yes

The politics that let TI in

In 1984, India had pushed IBM out, foreign ownership was effectively capped, and the state had no category for exporting something invisible. By the end of 1985, a Dallas semiconductor company was running a wholly owned R&D centre in Bangalore with its own satellite link. Somebody made that possible. This piece reports how.

• Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi's blessing, the Department of Electronics, and the machinery invented for one company: the bonded warehouse, the first Softex form, an export zone of one.
• The states. Karnataka under Ramakrishna Hegde won the prize; a young Chandrababu Naidu was already manoeuvring to take it elsewhere. What did each state offer, and why did Bangalore win?
• The legacy. The TI arrangement became the reference design. Our narrators say TI worked with the DOE on what became software export-zone policy, and that its billing model, worked out with Infosys's founders, became the STPI playbook every exporter used. The documented record is thinner than the memory. Part of this commission is establishing what actually happened.
• The quiet engine. Transfer pricing made the offshore model work. How, and who understood that at the time?

This is reported archival work, not memoir. The oral accounts exist and we will share them; the paper trail is patchy, which is exactly why we are commissioning a reporter. Where the record contradicts memory, the record wins.

What we provide

• First-hand accounts from our interview archive: TI's first managing director, its India finance lead, Dallas-side executives, and the engineers who filed the first paperwork.
• Our research briefs on the politicians and bureaucrats of the era, with sources and the open questions flagged.
• Introductions where our narrator network can make them.
• An editor and a fact-checker. Every claim in the book carries provenance; this piece is held to the same bar.