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'What's happening in India is mind-blowing'
Posted Date: 05 Jan 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Career Guidance
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Posted By: Anitha Manoj Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 5
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Despite a weak education system and big problems with infrastructure,
India is racing ahead to become a major hub for research, design, and
innovation, says Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian American
entrepreneur-turned-academic.
With outsourcing going far beyond low level IT, innovation is
increasingly happening offshore, said Delhi-born Wadhwa, a Wertheim
Fellow at Harvard Law School's Labour and Worklife Programme.
But 'what's happening in India is particularly mind-blowing,' he said.
'You wouldn't expect a country with few washing machines and dryers to
be designing the next generations of these for American consumers...or
to be designing key components of automobiles and jetliners...or next
generation retail systems...or chipsets for high definition TVs.'
Wadhwa said describing this as 'just the tip of the iceberg'.
It may not be clear whether this is good or bad for the US, but what
is clear is that globalisation is unstoppable, he said, asking the US,
which has so far gained from globalisation, to 'be smart enough to
adjust its policies to benefit and stay ahead'.
Some of the debates in the US are simply misguided, he said. For
example, the anti-immigration crowd that says the best way to stop
offshoring is to limit the number of green cards, permits for
permanent residence in the US.
Research by his team at Duke and Harvard universities has shown that
there are over one million skilled workers in the US on temporary
visas waiting for permanent residence, Wadhwa said.
'If we send a few hundred thousand away we'll simply accelerate the
trend and weaken the US competitive position,' he said in an e-mail
interview to IANS on a seminar that he gave at Harvard recently with
Pete Engardio of BusinessWeek.
Stephanie Overby of 'CIO Magazine', a periodical for chief information
officers and other IT professionals, has also cited research by
Wadhwa's team at Duke and Harvard to suggest that the next wave of
globalisation will see offshoring of R&D to India and China.
Wadhwa, who was founder and CEO of two technology companies earlier,
says the ramifications of globalisation will be much greater than the
industrial revolution. 'It will impact our standard of living here in
the US in the next five to 10 years.'
It's no longer just 'low-end' work like call centre positions or data
entry or even midlevel programming that's being shipped to China and
India. High-value research and development work also is moving
offshore, says Engardio.
And while cost is still the major driver, it's also about where talent
and capabilities are available, and where they are available in mass.
In spite of the respondents' praise of American workers in a Wadhwa
survey, the offshoring of engineering and IT work to China and India
continues for a variety of reasons, including the availability and
cost of labour, and its proximity to new product markets.
It's not just massive multinational corporations setting up R&D shops
in Asia. Top-tier Indian IT service providers, once known for pure
software development, are going after R&D business too, says Engardio.
Satyam has set up a huge, industrial engineering facility. HCL
Technologies is doing avionics work for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.
'When you're talking about offshoring,' CIO cites Engardio as saying,
'the conversation is no longer just about costs. It's also about where
talent and capabilities are available.'
Though cost-cutting remains the driver behind offshoring, he says this
work won't come back to the US as India's wages or other costs rise.
'The shift is permanent.'
In other words, American workers may be terrific. But they're
expensive. And there aren't enough of them, according to Engardio. If
the US held on to more of the foreign-born students awarded advanced
degrees, there might not be as many of them available in India or
China either, according to Wadhwa.
Also integral to the shift of product R&D offshore is the focus on
embedded software. 'There's a tremendous need for engineering and
software expertise,' Engardio says, 'and the Indian IT services
companies like Wipro and Tata have that. They are now the biggest
industrial design companies in the world.'
The dynamic turns R&D offshoring into a slightly different numbers
game. 'If you want to keep up and have to introduce this kind of
innovation and the myriad services you need to offer, it would be very
difficult to do in the US just due to workforce capacity issues,'
Engardio says.
'The only thing (India) isn't doing is owning the intellectual
property. The multinationals are pulling the strings and staying at
the top of the food chain, which is why the debate over whether this
is good or bad for the United States is very, very murky,' CIO quotes
him as saying. 'The American companies have India working for us, in a
way.'
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Responses
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| Author: Avdhut Sonpethkar 09 Jan 2008 | Member Level: Gold Points : 4 | Cool man now even the common man is benifited from the economical highs in India.
All the farmers can now sell their products in international market and earn revenue. Not only we are pushing the americans back to their feet but we are now buying them.
Now they know what is GLOBALIZATION
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