A lot of India-related topics appeared in the feeds today…
My fellow blogger from my MBA cohort, Cogito, hasn’t posted much on his Indophiles blog for a long time; I guess being married now has something to do with that, eh Cogito? However, the Indophiles RSS feed twitched in its sleep or something, and sent out a whole bunch of articles dating back a couple of years. It was opportune, because the last article discusses nanotechnology, currently much on my mind after reading the Diamond Age. Cogito links to a Red Herring article (subscriber-only, unfortunately) about Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, who now plans to establish a nanotech city in north India…
The prominent UK thinktank Demos has just published a series of reports on innovation in Asia: The Atlas of Ideas. The four papers (one on innovation in Asia generally, and one each on India, China, and South Korea) are 10 pounds each, but there are other free downloads. The press release for the paper on India says:
“Many Indian policy makers believe that the UK is in danger of complacency, with most young Indians now choosing the US and Silicon Valley over the UK.”
(Also interesting is that apparently the researchers also spent time in Singapore: why no paper on innovation here, I wonder…?)
Meanwhile, Information Week inform us that Accenture now have more staff based in India than they do in the US:
The tipping point is here. For the first time, a major Western outsourcer will have more staff in India than in the United States, as Accenture says it plans to increase its head count on the subcontinent to 35,000 by August.
However, there is still some hope for those in Europe and the US who are willing to chase opportunity, as quantity of employees in India doesn’t necessarily equate to quality – or, these days, affordability. Asia Times discovers that executive search firms in India are fielding more and more queries from Westerners who, with their greater experience at senior levels, combined with the increasing cost of local staff, offer attractive value for money if they will relocate to India.
All of the above applies more or less accurately to China as well, of course, but the language difference complicates things more.
India’s a great place. It’s just waiting for that right opportunity. Japan got in post ww2 doing cars, and China’s become the world’s gadget assembly plant. I think India’s better than call centres and tech outsourcing. It just needs to find the right niche, one the whole country can buy into.
ggw
Lets hope it continues but unless we chagne our policies towards labor, infrastructure and see to it that rural development also takes place commensurately, all this could be shorlived.