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Executives at Indian outsourcing companies are aware there's a political backlash in the U.S. against offshored jobs, but they're not too worried: They know that the cold logic of profit is on their side.
Apr 20, 2004 |
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
April 19, 2004 | BANGALORE, India -- Midday, no one is swimming in the pristine pool on the Bangalore campus of Infosys Technologies, India's largest publicly traded high-tech company. There's no one assuming any contorted postures in the yoga studio either, or running on a treadmill in the gym. But a smattering of programmers are getting in a few strokes on the putting greens sprinkled between the dozens of glass-and-chrome office buildings.
The pool, the gym and the offices are all embedded in a landscape of tasteful horticultural opulence. Palm trees and ferns edge neatly clipped green lawns. Manicured flowerbeds overflow with blooming birds of paradise -- the very same orange and purple flowers you'd find decorating the grounds of a Silicon Valley tech giant in Northern California.
The Infosys campus doesn't just mimic the corporate luxury of a giant U.S. software company, it surpasses it, an imposing refutation, denial even, of Third World stereotypes. (In early April, Infosys announced plans to significantly enhance its U.S. presence.) Some 7,000 of the company's 25,000 employees work at this campus, 95 percent of them programmers, average age 26 years old. Their workplace is so sprawling that golf carts ferry executives and visitors from building to building, just like at Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Bicycles are freely available for employees who want to speed up a trip from building No. 1 to building No. 22. The scale of the company's outdoor cafeterias is so big that they look less like office lunchrooms back in the states than like food courts at American amusement parks.
Last year, this company received 1 million résumés.
The contrast between the bucolic, sanitized environs of this firm and the landscape outside its guarded gates is so stark that the two could be separated by a moat. On the Infosys campus, there's only one hint of that outside world: A handful of poor women who live near the campus water the company's landscaping, hired as part of the corporation's charitable efforts.
One spacious lawn on campus displays a scattering of small trees, each one neatly labeled with the name of the visiting dignitary who planted it, a roster that includes Tony Blair, Michael Dell and Bill Gates. The fledgling shoots of the young, ceremonial trees send a message to the programmers who work here -- the world's most famous businessmen and politicians are now coming to Bangalore to see what the Indian software industry is up to.
"All of us were brought up thinking that we belong to the Third World, and in all probability we will remain there," says Sunil Mehta, vice president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India. But in recent years, the rise of software and other high-tech and telecommunications-related industries has resulted in an exhilarating change of consciousness. "We know if we develop global quality standards and are globally competitive, we know that we can pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and say: 'We belong to the First World.' I think it is really irrelevant whether you are from India, the Philippines, China, Eastern Europe or Africa."
White-collar globalization is no boogeyman in India: Newspapers here like to call the workers at companies like Infosys "the young hopefuls," beacons of modernization in a society where 50 percent of the population is still illiterate. But everyone in the tech industry in India is fully conscious of the political controversy that has erupted over the topic of outsourced and offshored jobs in the United States -- a country that is also, unsurprisingly, the home of many of their biggest clients.
Their message back? These are your rules we are playing by, and you'll find it difficult, or impossible, to change them.
