George Bush laid the foundations of an economic recovery; Bill Clinton enjoyed its fruits. The same can be said about the Vajpayee government and India's knowledge-based offerings.

The foundations for the emerging Indian success in knowledge-based services were laid by Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh's economic policies which made possible the emergence of the brightest star in India's knowledge- based offerings, software services.

Had the new policy regime not come, N R Narayana Murthy might still have been chasing telephone connections. Indira Gandhi's introduction of the Patents Act enabled Indian R&D workers to use their skills in process chemistry to copy and develop cheap medicines.

• India Shining!
• Mini-Budget 2004-05

And the Rao-Singh duo's signing the TRIPs agreement made India fall in line with the global mainstream of protecting intellectual property rights. This made it clear to those with foresight like Anji Reddy, founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories, that the future was in new drug discovery.

While Singh's decision to make software earnings tax free helped boost exports, the present government is in danger of scoring a self goal by taxing BPO services offered out of India.

At the officials' level, two people deserve credit. The first is N Vittal, who as secretary in the department of electronics in the early nineties gave India its first earth stations and software technology parks. He did this through a brilliant piece of dribbling to bypass the DoT.

When he found that DoT was more interested in rural telephony than high bandwidth connectivity, he got permission to divert the funds lying with his department, to set up six earth stations around the country. Without this decision, offshoring would not have come about.

The second mandarin who deserves credit is A R Mashelkar, the director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Over a decade ago, he was the first to outline a vision that owning high tech products was a costly proposition but if your skills were great and costing dirt cheap, you could become the world's R&D centre.

Armed with this vision he went about transforming CSIR by giving it a new credo - first patent and then publish. Listening to him, GE decided to make India a primary centre for its high technology research. Today over a hundred MNCs have critical R&D labs in India.

The one person in the present government who deserves credit for taking India's knowledge offerings forward by sorting out the telecommunications mess is Arun Shourie.

The change of guard that he has brought about in TRAI has smoothened and accelerated India's progress along the road to convergence in the ICT space. This cannot but help deliver and showcase India's knowledge based offerings better.