I just watched a fascinating series telling the story of Chris Jobin, a New York computer programmer whose job was outsourced to TCS in Bangalore, India. During the episode, we follow Chris to Bangalore, as he looks for a job and then work at a call center company for 30 days.

“30 days” is a show created by Morgan Spurlock for Fox News, and known for the “Super-Size me” episode, during which Spurlock eat all his meals at McDonald’s for one month (which leaves him in poor shape!). The concept of this show is to immerge a volunteer for 30 consecutive days into an environment where his/her core beliefs are likely to be shaken.

Two major thoughts occurred to me, after watching this episode.

The first one is a reflection of something I personally experienced when outsourcing to India. While in Bangalore, Chris and Sonny, his host and co-worker discuss outsourcing. Sonny is totally convinced that jobs are outsourced to India only because Indian programmers are better than their American counterparts. He has a hard time acknowledging economic factors are the key drivers.

The second and major observation has been told many times; it is the poor country infrastructure and the poor distribution of wealth, two fundamental issues facing India. In the article published in April 2007 by CIO magazine “why their infrastructure troubles will become your problem”, Kris Gopalakrishnan, The President of Infosys notes that ‘India’s infrastructure has not kept pace with its growth, (…) and is a bottleneck to our growth.”

This infrastructure problem is likely among the major reasons why China is going to claim global leadership over India: the Chinese infrastructure is way ahead, and developing more rapidly, widening the gap between the two countries. And while China is facing major challenges, like the unequal distribution of wealth between the Eastern and Western regions, their political system enables them to move rapidly and with little opposition. In contrast, the conflict between traditional culture and modern life styles render the problem even harder to tackle in India.

On the same subject, they are two articles worth reading, both written by people who are passionate about India.

• The first one is from Mark Hillary and about some recent decisions taken by the government of Karnataka, the Indian state where Bangalore is located. (read here)

• The second one is a great comment on the above mentioned episode of “30 days” written by a professor at the University of San Francisco. (read here)

India is becoming a world leader of today’s global economy, and it is certainly no good news for anybody including China, if India does not address its infrastructure issue as soon as possible. I would even say that it is paramount for the entire outsourcing industry that the conditions are created for India’s outsourcing business to continue to flourish.

Posted by Remi on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 12:44 PM.