Nowadays, not a day goes by in which we don’t have an article about outsourcing in our national newspapers - very often these stories make the front page too. And it’s been like this for some time now.
Until about late last year, these stories were limited mainly to the IT and ITES industry, but gradually it’s begun to include the manufacturing sector too. Outsourcing to India kicked off in a big way with Indian programmers fixing ancient coding before the Millenium Bug bit, but gradually spread to product development within the IT industry (which is really big business now). It then began to include the call center industry, and soon enough the back-end operations of several MNCs. BPO is one of the fastest growing industries in India now. Outsourcing has now encompassed the manufacturing sector too - several companies have announced plans for, or already have begun, making India a global hub for automotive components. R&D by MNCs is slowly taking off too in a big way.
While this is really good news for us, what with all the new jobs being created and all that foreign exchange flowing in, it’s also making news here because it’s taking away jobs from their originating countries (as opposed to the setting up of new operations to handle additional capacity, for example). Call centers are closing by the dozens in the US and UK and opening by the dozens here. We read of unions in the UK threatening to go on strike to prevent call center jobs from leaving the island, and legislation in several US states to prevent outsourcing of work from state-owned entities to non-americans (read mainly Indians). And so on…
From reading our newspapers, you’d get the impression that the world (rather mainly the US and UK) is gathering it’s forces to prevent outsourcing to India!! Is it really that big a deal in your respective countries? What’s your opinion about it? Do you feel anger, or resentment, or are you resigned to the fact that this might be the way most things are going to end up?