India needs its moonshot diviners

Illustration by Suneesh Kalarickal

Elon Musk had an overriding obsession, to colonize Mars. He even said he would like to die on it. And last week, when NASA selected his start-up SpaceX to take astronauts to the moon, Musk’s 20-year-old moonshot could be said to have had paid off.

Musk is only the latest in a long line of dreamers who have dared to chase the impossible. Christopher Columbus set out to discover India and ended up finding America. Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Thomas Edison, our very own C.V. Raman and Srinivasa Ramanujan, all these were people whose reach, in the words of poet Robert Browning, exceeded their grasp.

We call their endeavours moonshots after the Apollo 11 spaceflight project in 1969 which landed the first human on the moon. They define the best companies and the best individuals. With one such long shot, Steve Jobs revolutionized music. Today, Apple, the company he founded, is working on an electric car. At Google, such was the passion for moonshots shared by its enigmatic founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that they eventually set up an enterprise called X, the moonshot factory, to institutionalize what they had been doing randomly, chasing projects like Calico, a company which effectively aimed at curing death or flying cars dubbed electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOLs).

Of course, every dream is not a moonshot. In fact, very few are and not because they aren’t visionary enough but because there’s no will to pursue them beyond the idea stage. Behind every successful moonshot is grind, frustration, anxiety and tenacity.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in a recent Harvard Business Review article called the development of the company’s acclaimed vaccine for Covid-19 the result of a “moon-shot challenge”.  He explains: “On March 19, 2020, as Covid-19 swept across the world, I challenged everyone at Pfizer to 'make the impossible possible': to develop a vaccine more quickly than anyone ever had before.” At the time in March 2020 that Pfizer got into partnership with BioNTech, which had already developed several candidates to be tested, no mRNA vaccines had ever been approved for clinical use.

In November, barely nine months later, the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine was cleared for emergency use. For context, the typical vaccine development program can take up to 10 years to reach a similar stage.

That’s really what the essence of a moonshot is. It isn’t doing something someone else has done but at lower cost. Nor is it incremental change. It is a child’s dream not an adult’s fancy.

India has had a few world beaters but most of them have emerged through serendipity rather than from a plan. Thus, in 1981, seven young engineers, N.R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N.S. Raghavan, S. Gopalakrishnan, S.D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora, quit their jobs and working out of Murthy’s living room in Pune, decided they could write software that would power the world’s most advanced applications. Their clients would be the world’s most powerful companies but they would service them out of India, then not even a speck on the world technology map. They were soon joined by others and an IT powerhouse was born, one that is today India’s best known calling card.

But India needs other, mightier moonshots. Recent success in areas like pharma, biotech and IT gives us a great assessment of our globally competitive skills. Based on those, we need to define half a dozen moonshots and then chase them with all we have. Thus, if we have strengths in pharmaceuticals, becoming the vaccine supplier to the world can’t be enough of a goal. For one, it is too much of the low-hanging fruit and in turn it yields very little. Instead we must focus on two or three major diseases, and then put all our medical, pharmaceutical, technological might behind finding a cure for them. That would require a world-class research lab run by scientists and doctors, not bureaucrats, and the kind of financial backing that allowed Moderna to function for 10 years without the burden of showing any returns on the billions of dollars it had raised in the form of private capital and public funds.

It is instructive to look at how X defines its moonshots, all of which sit at the intersection of three ingredients: a huge problem in the world that affects millions or billions of people; a radical, sci-fi sounding solution that may seem impossible today; a technology breakthrough that gives a glimmer of hope that the solution could be possible in the next 5-10 years.

How many Indian projects do you think meet these three criteria?