Bill Gates meets Professor Bhatnagar
By Jayant Mishra

Professor Subhash Bhatnagar recently won accolades when his paper titled ‘Results from a study of impact of eGovernment projects in India’ was selected as the best paper submitted at the ICTD meet in April, 2009 at Doha. In an exclusive interview to techgoss, Mr. Bhatnagar shared his experience on getting the award, his future focus and about his meeting with Bill Gates.

Prof. Bhatnagar graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1968 and later did his MBA and Doctoral Programme from IIM Ahmedabad. He taught at IIMA for 30 years before taking early retirement.  He has been invited as Visiting Professor by a number of reputed universities in USA and Africa.  Prof Bhatnagar also had a substantial stint with the Work Bank.

The Indian Government has invited Prof Bhatnagar to serve on a number of national committees.  His in-depth knowledge and honest views are also sought by a number of Indian and international organizations.

TechGoss (TG) - Mr. Bhatnagar, could you brief us about the ICTD conference?
Prof Bhatnagar -  The International conference on information and communication technologies and development (ICTD), discusses how different kinds of technologies have been deployed for development in the field of academics, health, nutrition, poverty etc. It is an academic conference which is organized by Carnegie Mellon University. This year saw, 300 attendee’s from around 30 countries, various schools and industry players like Microsoft, HP, IBM, etc. From around 250 papers submitted, 16 strong papers were selected for presentation and 10-15 were asked for poster session- on their booths.

TG - How was it working on his paper, do you rate it as one of the strongest papers?
Prof Bhatnagar - This paper was co-authored by Nupur Singh and we worked together for a period of 6 months on this. The study was based on the impact of e-governance; eight government departments of three states were assessed. This empirical study was based on investigation findings from 250 citizens. I won’t say it was the strongest but I surely reckon this as one of the best.

TG- What was it like having a 20 minutes one-to-one meeting with Bill Gates at the conference?
Prof Bhatnagar - Gates wanted to get an assessment on how technology is used in India. I presented some seven or eight papers to him, and we did talk about e-governance in India. He showed special interest on some of the projects I discussed with him and it might get carried further, but the meeting had no concrete agenda.

TG- What else are you working on?
Prof Bhatnagar- I recently initiated a new course - MBA in e-governance. The course is currently offered by TAPMI management institute, Manipal. My aim is to further convince other business schools across India to offer this course. The government is also taking a keen interest in this program and has agreed to pay the entire fees for 20 government candidates.