Outsourcing is the beginning
In just the last two days we have seen an amazing cross section of not only life in India, but also of business in India. The first day we saw a small IT software business, a medium-sized call center, and a top-rated outsource provider. The next day we met with local students studying management and business, toured IIT’s (an MIT of India) incubation center, talked with a niche music label executive, and toured a local printing press. It has been a whirlwind of activity and a brain-swelling amount of information, but in the process we also made the local newspaper and experienced the shops, temples, traffic, and life of Chennai. My roommate, Joseph, and I even had drinks with 3 Scotsmen who worked on a ship busily laying new telecom wires along the seabeds of India. At almost every stop we were greeted with flowers, gifts, food, and amazing hospitality. The “Delhi belly” that had a fiery impact on me the last few days was finally cured by Pizza Hut (apparently it responded well to the comforts of home).
What is going on over here is amazing. Books, magazines, and newspapers are being scanned and transcribed and ads, checks, insurance forms, legal filings, health records, and countless other documents are being processed and transformed by the hundreds of thousands a day. Software development, code writing, troubleshooting, quality checking, and dozens of other activities that can be outsourced are being outsourced. This is happening amidst the chaotic and ancient background that is India and it is creating a new India that is growing at mind warping speeds. This is a place of many contrasts, a place of extremes, a place where the last millennium exists at once. Thousands, if not millions, of Indian lives are being made better from the opportunities every day. There is hope here that is palatable and there is talent and aspiration in huge quantities.
Indians I have noticed are very confident in their future, doing outsourcing work is nowhere near the extent of what is going on. At IIT we saw the cutting edge of rural technology development. Where the West seems to be constantly focusing on the next best thing and in stuffing more features and complexity into products, companies within IIT’s incubation center are figuring out how to bring things like telephone, internet, banking, finance, education, healthcare, and viable business models to the most rural and destitute parts of their country. In the process they are innovating in the opposite direction, discovering how to make things simpler, easier, and cheaper and of how to make those things survive the environmental, social, and economic challenges that exist. The end result could mean the improvement of not just millions of lives, but of billions, not only within India, but all across the world.
I heard something from one of the presentations that stood out, it was a remark about the educational efforts being made to shift attitudes at every social strata away from the idea that government will provide for you and towards a more entrepreneurial mindset, that handouts, charity, and welfare are not self-sustaining and that every citizen needs to stand on their own feet. Basically, India gets it. India wants to lift itself up and it wants to show the world what it is capable of. There is a lot of pride in heritage and is a noticeable desire for society to find the balance between the “Lexus & the Olive Tree,” to hone a sense of what it will take to adapt and catch up, while preserving and keeping what is uniquely Indian. From what I’ve seen so far, they are succeeding. |
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