Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"If you want to be competitive, you have to allow the rest of the world to compete," says Laxman Badiga, chief executive of "talent transformation" at Wipro Technologies, Infosys' only rival in the competition to be the country's biggest outsourcing firm.
The weird logic of globalization has resulted in the oddity that historically socialist India, which only began opening up its economy in the early '90s, is now lecturing the U.S. about the virtues of free trade. Executives here are quick to point out that American firms, such as Texas Instruments and G.E., were the first multinationals to discover that low-cost, high-quality work could be done in India. And as companies like Infosys and Wipro have sprung up to sell Indian labor to the rest of the world, Americans have been their biggest customers: Some 70 percent of Infosys' revenues still come from the U.S., according to Kris Gopalakrishnan, the chief operating officer and one of the company's co-founders. Sixty percent of Wipro's clients are in the U.S., says Badiga.
The rise of the industry has helped seed the aspirations of a growing middle class. "There is a new generation of young people who are reinventing the social fabric of India," says Tina George, a spokesperson for Infosys, herself just 30 years old. Preshant, a 27-year-old programmer eating a Domino's pizza at one of Infosys' corporate cafeterias, sums up the changes in his country this way: "It would have been a dream to own a car in the past. Now it is a need." He drives a Honda motorcycle.
In just a decade, the Indian middle class has ballooned from about 100 million to 300 million, according to Gopalakrishnan. And while his industry represents a small part of the overall Indian economy, with about $12 billion in annual revenues, it's still the fastest growing sector, jumping by more than 20 percent a year.
The social changes wrought by that new middle class comes with its own anxieties. The February 2004 issue of India's Cosmopolitan magazine warns of a sinister plague of "DINS" -- "dual income, no sex syndrome" -- afflicting software professionals, complete with supporting data from a fertility expert declaring that 18 percent of women and 26.78 percent of men in I.T. (information technology) suffer from low libidos. Similar inflammatory articles decrying the allegedly high divorce and suicide rate among programmers in Bangalore appear on the front pages of the New Indian Express.
In the wake of Bangalore's rapid growth companies have put pressure on the local government, resulting in a cleanup of litter on the streets, and the draining and restocking of fetid lakes -- a potent symbol of wealth trickling down. But the growth has also inspired rapid gentrification that has made real estate prices skyrocket, prompting some to wonder who is really benefiting from all this new wealth.
"The aspirations of the average Indian to be successful have changed in the last 10 or 12 years," says Gopalakrishnan. "I don't know if this is the good influence or the bad influence of the West, but people are much more materialistic. They want to own the house, they want to own a car, they want to own the latest television. So, that also puts pressure on wanting to earn more, be at the right spot in an organization."
In this context, the political backlash against outsourcing in the United States is met with a mix of concern and incredulity.
Abhinar, 28, an engineer who has worked at Infosys for three and a half years, sees the "noise" about outsourcing in the U.S. as "election propaganda. That's it." He doubts any broad protectionist measures will be enacted stateside.
Wipro's Badiga sounds more confident than many U.S. software programmers are in their ability to retool their careers. He expresses confidence that U.S. programmers who lose their jobs to outsourcing will find new work: "I.T. is a high-skilled labor. There is not much issue for them to have another job. Because they are educated they will always find jobs." But when manufacturing jobs went offshore, "The blue-collar worker became the call-center worker. Now, where does he go, because he's not highly educated?" He suggests that the U.S. government should invest in retraining such workers, as it did when manufacturing workers lost their jobs.
NASSCOM's Mehta echoes Badiga's sentiment, suggesting that Americans should remember their strengths: "What the U.S. has been able to do very well all these years is reinvent itself. The U.S. has always remained at the forefront of innovation whether it's I.T. or nanotechnology. I really think that within the U.S. the question is: 'OK, how do we invest in ourselves, so we can continue to lead from the front?'"
