The rise of Indian techies inside American government

If the likes of Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Parag Agrawal have stormed into corner offices of tech companies, there is another American bastion slowly falling to Indian Americans: government.A few weeks back, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the world’s premier spooks club, appointed Nand Mulchandani as its first-ever chief technology officer (CTO). Mulchandani, a Silicon Valley veteran who has been at the helm of several successful startups, will be the face of CIA’s technological strength.Or take the example of Raj Iyer. A PhD in electrical engineering, Iyer was a former partner and managing director at Deloitte Consulting. Last year, the US Army made him its first chief information officer (CIO), a rank equivalent to a three-star general. He is the highest-ranking Indian American civilian in the US department of defense. He supervises an annual budget of $16 billion for the US Army's IT operations. Cut to Anushree Bag. As executive director, enterprise governance, risk and compliance (GRC) of Indiana state since late 2019, Bag played a key role as her agency assumed the responsibility of moving 38,000 state employees to a remote work environment following the pandemic. medium91814498Ready for a challengeThe list is long and illustrious: Rajiv Rao, New York state CTO and executive deputy chief information officer; Suresh Soundararajan, CIO at the department of health of Virginia state; Rohit Tandon, chief information security officer of the state of Minnesota; and Gundeep Ahluwalia, CIO, US department of labor. Currently, the job of CTO of the US government has not yet been filled by President Joe Biden. It remains to be seen if he has an Indian American IT leader in mind. So, what attracts Indian Americans to top government jobs, despite very likely, lower pay packets and less glamorous career paths?“I pivoted from my career in private industry to serve in the government by joining the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center at the US department of defence (DoD) where I am driving the DoD's next-generation AI efforts,” Mulchandani wrote in a LinkedIn post. Most recently, he served as the CTO and acting director of DoD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Centre (JAIC).Bag was only four months into her job when the challenge of moving thousands of state employees from offices to a work-from-home regime popped up during the Covid pandemic. medium91814532It is probably challenges like these that are attracting a growing number of talented Indian American tech professionals to government jobs in the US, in many cases from plum private-sector roles.“With only two-and-a-half-years into the job, I’m still a newbie in the government space. I am aware of several Indian Americans in critical roles in government who are doing ground-breaking work,” Bag says. She adds that Iyer and Mulchandani are trailblazers for many Indian Americans. “Dr Raj Iyer’s choice to give up a senior executive leadership position in Deloitte to lead the US Army’s IT portfolio and Mr Mulchandani’s choice to assume a CTO role with the CIA may be the harbinger of a new era where more Indian Americans may choose to prioritise impact over monetary compensation. They’re choosing to leave a legacy and inspire other Indian Americans.” medium91814550People over profitOften the ease of lateral movement between the revolving doors of government, corporates and academia in the US helps many Indian American professionals take the plunge. “The opportunity to make the world a better place through public service is a powerful driver for people like Iyer and Mulchandani to leave comfortable jobs and take up challenging assignments in government,” says Nish Acharya, CEO of consulting firm Equal Innovation. Acharya had served in the Barack Obama administration as director of innovation and entrepreneurship and was a senior adviser to the secretary of commerce.Along with the spirit of public service and wanting to make a wider impact, Indian Americans, who have achieved success as entrepreneurs or corporate bosses, are also looking at coming of age in public life.“The community has already achieved great recognition in the US for its technology acumen. And now serving in government in tech-leadership roles provides an opportunity to make a difference in this country,” says Gopal Khanna, who was the first person of Indian origin appointed to a CIO role at the Peace Corps, an important US government agency, by President George W Bush in 2002.Khanna, who was a Republican political appointee, now sees a shift with more and more tech professionals from the Indian American community taking up government jobs as a career option. “It’s not just the corporates; there has been more visibility for Indian Americans in top tech jobs in government both at the federal and state levels. Many of them are not political appointees and hence remain in their positions for longer terms and are often elevated to the top because of their expertise,” he says. medium91814684Director of enterprise solution services for the Texas department of information resources, Krishna Kumar Edathil is not a political appointee but an IT professional who chose to move to a government role from the private sector. He believes that as an Indian immigrant, he needs to engage and be part of policymaking and government. “The best way to achieve this was to take technology to the people and serve in the government. I think for most of us it is a passion to serve the nation that we now call home,” says Edathil. March to the Capitol HillIndian Americans have held important IT roles in government in the past too. In fact, the very first technology boss at the White House was Indian American Aneesh Chopra, appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama as CTO of the US. Chopra who was the highest-ranking Indian American in the Obama government quit in 2012 to run for lieutenant governor in the state of Virginia where he had earlier served as Virginia's secretary of technology.Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the US, too served in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011. Earlier, he was CTO of the District of Columbia. Kundra who was behind Data.gov which made a big impact by releasing thousands of government datasets to entrepreneurs, allowing them to build innovative applications. At a virtual interaction with Nasa scientists last year, President Joe Biden had said, “Indian-of-descent Americans are taking over the country. People of Indian origin are shedding their nerdy image and stepping into leadership roles in a number of fields, especially in the present American dispensation. The next step is to flex their political muscle. medium91786729How Indians are leading some of world's best B-schools medium91786745