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Thank you India
Tech's love-hate relationship with a country...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 21 March 2003

Two stories today highlight IT's almost schizophrenic relationship with India. As we arrived at the office today, Sun CEO Scott McNealy had just finished the latest leg of his Asian tour, saying how his company will give $300m worth of software to students and universities there. Bill Gates and Microsoft went through a similar exercise at the end of last year, and while the companies' actions aren't selfless, they do show these top vendors see the value in the nation.

Then we heard about BT call centre staff, upset that jobs look like they will be exported to cheaper-to-run Indian facilities. When companies have 'offshored' in the past, and especially when they have used temporary work visas to hire IT pros from overseas, domestic workers have complained about 'cheap foreign labour'.

So who should we listen to? Speaking specifically about India, there is no question of the quality of the tech workforce. Without stereotyping, technical and engineering skills there are top notch and the country and the Indian diaspora have certainly come up with some of the industry's top entrepreneurs. The joke about a large part of Silicon Valley being run by ex-pat Indians and Brits isn't far from the truth. Look at the VPs at Intel, as one prominent example.

And companies like Sun, in a state that has famously had more than its fair share of anti-immigration hysteria, are notable for fighting for H1-B visas, because they know so much talent exists outside of any one country.

However, yesterday we heard about an ex-Sun employee suing the company, alleging cheaper, younger workers had been brought in from India at the expense of available home-grown talent. And when BA ditched a number of contractors a year or two ago we heard from spurned IT professionals complaining - wrongly, in general - about "poorly qualified" Indian DBAs.

silicon.com accompanied then E-minister Patricia Hewitt on a diplomatic tour of Indian cities and IT centres of excellence in 2000. We hear often from world-beating Indian vendors such as Infosys and Wipro, and have many readers in the sub-continent.

We think we can say the top vendors know what they're doing when they identify the expertise in the country and want to tap it. User organisations also realise importing talent from anywhere where it's cheaper but just as good makes sense.

That, of course, is balanced by governments' responsibility to their voters - and is why we have immigration laws and restrictions at all.

That's understandable. Knee-jerk reactions and slurs about professionals from a country as vast and diverse as India aren't.