How India Can Engineer a Future Beyond Software

-- In the early 2000s, Alok Nanda’s new colleagues called him the “bumper guy.” Nanda's job at General Electric Co. back then was putting some plastic between the bumper and the beam of a Suzuki Swift. As Frederic Neumann, HSBC’s chief Asia economist, says: “India’s services connectivity to the world economy is so large nowadays that it ‘compensates’ for the lack of goods trade connectivity.” It’s time to use those links to target commercial services, where cross-border demand grew 9% to $7.5 trillion last year. As the chief technology officer for India at GE Aerospace, a role he's held since 2018, he and his team are working with colleagues in Niskayuna, New York, on a novel development platform that would, in one shot, offer 20% efficiency gains in future jet engines. “For an engineer, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.” When Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange on April 2, launching GE Aerospace as an independent public company, joining the party on the podium was Ravindra Shankar Ganiger. The team’s intellectual inputs, already at the heart of newer jet engines like GE9X, is crucial to Culp’s vision of “defining the future of flight.” GE woke up to India’s potential early.