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 Friday, 22 August 2008 |
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India 'Cannot Run on Outsourced Jobs' |
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Written by Demir Barlas
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Saturday, 29 April 2006 |
A word to the wise about sustainability, from Indian National Knowledge Commission Chairman Sam Pitroda
by Demir Barlas, Line56 Media, Friday, April 28, 2006
India's population is now over 1 billion and, as such, the country needs to produce something like 10 million jobs a year to combat endemic unemployment.
Of these 10 million needed annual jobs, says Indian National Knowledge Commission Chairman Sam Pitroda, 300,000 are coming from IT and business process outsourcing (BPO). This is what he told SiliconIndia yesterday: "Let us be very clear that the country cannot run on outsourced jobs, we would have to look for serious alternatives." Click here to find out more!
Pitroda appears to be one of the few Indians connected to that country's knowledge and labor elite who doesn't think offshore is a panacea for all of India's economic ills. In his interview, he made a candid comment calling attention to the fact that Indian offshore work is essentially wage slavery on behalf of Western companies who don't want to pay their own citizens fair wages. "By running after outsourced jobs we are merely solving the problems of others," said Pitroda. "We should not forget that solutions to our problems would have to be provided by us only."
It's a simple question of limited and sycophantic wealth creation. In the days of the British Raj, India had hundreds of fabulously wealthy princes and potentates who did the bidding of the Empire, and millions of poor peasants who were, shall we say, on the wrong side of globalization. Nothing has changed. India is still on the wrong side of globalization. Instead of bootlicking maharajahs, there are bootlicking business owners willing to underpay their compatriots in order to curry favor with foreigners. Instead of peasants, there are skilled employees who have to work for fifteen to thirty percent of what they are really worth and put up with various indignities as well. It is quite a sad thing to contemplate Indians attending "accent reduction classes" and Anglicizing their names because, alas, those who call in to them demand this kind of obeisance. At bottom, it's bigotry -- the same collective impulse that forbids, for example, Denzel Washington from kissing white women in the movies, demands that Indians adapt themselves to a "globalism" that is just a thinly-disguised recurrence of colonialism.
Perhaps the best way to understand the current Indian IT/BPO wave, from a historical perspective that some of my own Indian readers (Americanized enough, in this respect, to have no awareness of anything at all that took place before 1995) sneer at, is to think of it as a manifestation of postcolonialism -- a friendly, opt-in Raj, if you like. The first Raj was opt-in too. You could choose to serve the British or their servants, or you could choose to end up killed, in jail, or in deep poverty. Today a young and intelligent Indian can choose to join an electronic sweatshop in which she often has to leave her own name at the door, or she can end up in deep poverty.
Some choices aren't worth the name.
The responsibility of Indian elites is to, at long last, stop betraying their people to whatever foreigner happens to come along; to insist on higher wages, to abolish the sweatshop approach and mentality, and to respect the dignity of cultural difference. This will probably not take place, because Empires pay their bootlickers well and because human beings are inclined to take the bird in the hand over adopting a longer-term strategy to trying to improve their lot. Americans, at least, should be glad of this. The same Indians who are viciously and incessantly mocked for the taint of their dark skin and foreign accents should be recognized as who they are; like the Mexicans of Southern California, they are the enablers, not the stealers, of American livelihoods (our own companies are so inefficiently and greedily run that they would collapse if they had to pay Americans living wages, and the collapse would be far worse than the result of offshoring jobs). Today, Indians are even the enablers of American military policy in South Asia, acting as a buffer zone between China and the rest of Asia. I can understand that Indians would be sold out by their own elites; in India, this practice goes back thousands of years. But I can't understand why Americans would be so disdainful of their loyal imperial servants.
Perhaps if there are enough Indians with Pitroda's mentality, the servitude might turn into fair employment.
Reprinted from
http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7567 |
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