India Rising - Part I



A few people asked me who is Tom Friedman. I wanted to answer that question and when this link was sent to me as junk forward, I thought I will write what is in my mind.

There seems to be a general gung-ho about India's economic prospects. Post Bangalore, every wannabe-metro is laying ring roads and building IT-corridors. The beaming NASSCOMM cheif announces that the BPO industry will require a million or two more employees in the next two years and how inadequate our colleges are to meet this demand. Magazines sport cover stories on health services becoming the third big thing. The finance minister is in a hurry to push 10% envelope and even Laloo wants to consider buying a laptop because some magazine called him the CEO of Railways.

And Thomas Friedman is the New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer-winning author who has penned a book titled The World is Flat, which to a great extent deals with India's rise to economic power club with specific focus on, what else, IT and BPO.

If some of you really believe that, I'm sorry to spoil your party. To me, India is neither rising nor shining. At least not yet. Our swanky IT corridors and buzzling BPO centers and a few whites choosing India for their slip-disc surgery or Naturopathy don't mean much when you look at the big picture.

The big picture firstly, is the tag called 'outsourcing'. I consider that only as a glorified housemaid's job. You don't want to spend your time or your wife's time on dishwashing, sweeping, swabbing and dusting. You hire a maid whom you can pay pittance and she will do the dirty job so that you can focus on more valuable things. Your maid is quite thankful to you because you are providing bread and butter to her family. But she rarely raises to your level of lifestyle. Or you don't foresee her lifestyle raising to any level in the near future. I often consider our 'outsourcing' industry to the level of a housemaid.

Let me explain. Having been in the so-called software services, ITES or BPO for some years, I know what goes on. We borrow processes, work-flow techniques and best practices from our clients who are mostly from US. We often hear from our clients about the lack of ATD among us. ATD is Attention-to-Details. Some of our clients even monitor the process from onsite and want to know day by day status so that they can foresee any risks and avoid or manage them. Some clients go to the extent of providing us even the file-names of the modules we are supposed to work on.

And we do the dirty work here. Thomas Friedman, in his book explains this clearly. He thought he was addressing the American public's concern about the hoards of jobs going to India and China. He assures them confidently. 'Don't worry folks. The types of jobs going to India are only low-end administrative and software services jobs. This is a good opportunity so that you (the Americans) can focus on more value-added skill sets'.

I fully subscribe to what Friedman says about Americans going up the value ladder. Because what predominantly happens in India is these low-end BPO and software services jobs only. There are, however, instances of research centres being set up where some mission-critical and high-end jobs take place. But they are far and few. There's this article in Outlook on SAP setting up a research centre in Bangalore. Number? 130 employees. I don't know what 'research' happens over there, so I can't comment about it. But what happens in the famed Microsoft development centre? They develop a few DLLs (device drivers) for the forthcoming Windows system and they are jubilent. Probably Microsoft will be able to reap the returns of their investment by selling Windows to a few state governments in India. Get the certification exams developed by Indian vendors and whatever the money you spent is recovered quickly because there are thousands in India seeking these certifications.

We do not develop organisational processes, methodologies, or best practices. India still doesn't have a single world-class software emerging from its shores. The key, to me, does not lie in our fat Forex reserves. It lies in our knowledge repository. We haven't begun building it yet. We don't have knowledge workers. We only boast of skill sets.