Random crossroads and turning right.
August 18th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The License Raj once existed in India shielding her from the vulnerabilities of foreign market imbalances. The west has often craved for complete access to Indian markets to do business and dump its idea of capitalism. Fate, Destiny or Karma – whatever it may be called has a strange way of connecting the dots, of course looking backwards – as Steve Jobs famously said.
The ‘so called’ Prime Minister of India was once hailed and admired for bringing India out of such restrictions to the light, in a way benefitting the entire middle class of this nation to dream higher and be more comfortable if not prosperous or richer. Ironically, it is the same middle class – the next generation of course, that is going up against the current political power in the center headed by the same man whom apparently Nostradamus rumored to have predicted would rule.
India today stands as a giant that is often a point of hate in the west for storming the software world providing software services to many nations essentially amounting to billions of dollars in business. It has often been pointed out that we are this unique brand that combines our astute ability in logical functioning with the knowledge in English (against what/whom we once fought) making it the selling factor.
The world can neither do without our software services nor can they actually ignore this nation. They may find alternatives but not quite a replacement. The DotCom bubble made a lot of aspiring engineers to look for other disciplines, which apparently would have been the future, per the elders who had seen it all.
Luckily that was not the case. Even though a BE, ECE was in demand then, India never quite entered or understood the Manufacturing of Silicon which it happily gave up to China as it required physical labor and heavy/risky investment even though Bangalore is ironically dubbed “Silicon Valley of India”.
We just write software.
As much as the world is heavily dependent on the software business, a key market was conspicuously absent from all these ball game. India itself. It can be almost compared to No offshore Oil drilling by the US while constantly purchasing and suffering oil from Middle East.
Indian businesses have been very slow to adopt software and services – even after a heavy drive by various state and central governments in conducting e Business. Physical paper, Files folders and fountain pen with multi color ink exist even today. Blue Reynolds in the shirt pocket is still a trend going by the matrimony pictures on the websites.
There is not even a single valuable quality software product from this country selling it to the world even though such quality software sold by any one in the world has at least 1 Indian or probably Indian software companies behind it.
Today, more than that – corruption has been a major issue when dealing with how business is conducted in the government offices. Enough has been said on how the implementation of such eServices could possibly root out corruption where the system, its rules and the flow determines where your application would be currently and not the ‘officers’. It probably would even expose who missed to do their job. More power to metrics, graphs and excel sheets.
It is obvious now that India is ready for an IT revolution. As the world markets fumble and countries such as US is focusing on creating local jobs even in the software sector by curbing Visa Quota or implementing Government policies, the need to look elsewhere proactively to keep the nation going is inevitable.
Indians preferring low cost solutions and this job being high paying one (at least in comparison) may result in salary restructuring. After all this may become less lucrative and less attractive. The normalization of salaries could happen based on the revenue companies make from overseas business along with the income generated locally. Quite healthy, slow but steady and inclusive growth.
So as the political parties point to each other attempting to solve a political problem using a badly written Bill, its time to understand that there exists an equally average if not worse solution with the India’s apparently powerful IT industry.
More start up IT firms may rise in India working low costs solutions to Governments and small business. As these small businesses attempt to start conducting business effectively, they make profits all the while keeping the employment rate going because it creating the demand for IT companies venturing local markets. Not-so-high paying jobs would mean you would not be christened a software engineer at birth. Your kid could probably be a farmer or even an entrepreneur delivering local services or a cook.
A political party that understands and champions this idea attempting to bring about a second reform offering IT companies (who attempt to survive global flip flops today) to aggressively look for markets in India would take the cake for the next decade.
Destiny will once again find a leader probably with a Blue Turban and provide respite to the low income groups who today look helpless with all the high cost and unaffordable corruption. Middle class will once again do what it is intended to do. Work hard, voice concerns/opinions, fight at times and thus keep the nation going.
UPDATE: Within few hours of the post – Nandan Nilekani says technology enables all these and LokPal is not the only thing.
“You don’t fix Cars by having more people to inspect cars”
