Configuring qualified engineers as high tech clerks and telemarketers – how long can India brain drain for outsourcing revenue?
Kiran Chaube, Special Correspondent
December 24, 2004

Internationally known as “cyber coolies”, Indian engineers are today icons of high-tech clerks, telemarketers and desk top support people of the companies around the world.

After all the software contracts that are outsourced to India are repetitive work with little innovation. These are primarily low-end work like conversion of code from old legacy system to modern client server systems. Very little systems engineering or software business analysis is done in India, Simply put, Indian engineers are bought and sold like vegetables in the market for their intelligent logical robotic activities. 

Some of the kids go and learn American accent to be able to answer calls from America or UK. If there was a classic example of brain drain, nothing can exceed these. While India’s foreign currency reserves keep going up, no one knows what will happen to these millions of educated workers in India when the Western nations finally automate their processes in the next few years and the aging technocrats have no place to go. 

It is very common to see a mechanical or electronics engineer work as a coder for a Western company or their Indian body shop doing what a tenth grade student can do. Educated and elites are used to answer calls form the Western nations. 

These engineers are very frustrated when they reach 35 years of age. They are stagnated, robotized with hopeless career.

According to some think tanks, ten to fifteen years later, suicide among Indian technocrats will increase by 100 folds. Professionals need recognition, pride and glamour besides money. The glass veiling that Indian engineers face in UK and US are now in their homeland and they have no place to run for cover.

It is very common to see a first generation immigrant leave a managerial job in America start a Dunkin Donut or a Laundromat. But those opportunities are not available in India. After all USA is great for small businesses. There is true economic freedom in America. If you do not like your job, you can start your business.

But in India, small business looked down upon, as something bad in the social ladder and competing with large business is not easy in the developing world. The chartered accountant, the attorney, even your own employee will regard you as a helpless small fish out of water. In the mean time the big businesses in India will bribe the politicians, tax man and the criminal justice system right and left leaving you the small business owner in helpless condition.

Indian Government is making a grave mistake. The youth of country is the energy of the nation. Money and foreign currency is not everything. The future of the country depends not on servicing tail of the large Western Corporations. India must look at Japan and learn and overlook China. 

Toyota does not support General Motors service need. Toyota did compete with GM for the last many years. Today Toyota is bigger than GM. Similarly TCSD should not be servicing IBM, it should compete with IBM. It is not easy to compete with IBM or EDS – world’s best software service companies. But if you do not try you will never achieve anything.

Government of India must provide tax incentive for high tech product innovation that is marketed in developed countries. India must never allow dumping of its products in America or Europe or Japan. Given the fact that Indian industrialist are basically traders and have been that way for thousands of years, India may not expect much from these “quick money jokers”. Somehow, brain drain must stop so that the country’s under employment is taken care of.

One of the way Indian technical professionals used to run away from underemployment was to migrate to Canada, US and UK. Today that door is being slowly closed because the Western companies do not have jobs in their countries; they are bringing all these jobs to India itself.