Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Blog:
The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another’s business is practically a birthright.
Facebook and Indians have a magnetic connection. Everyone in my family in India except my father—who, at 77, is entitled to his suspicions of the medium—is a Facebook user. Every single friend of mine in India—except for an eccentric Bengali writer who idolizes a 19th-century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, for which reason he cannot be said to have come to terms with the modern world—is a Facebook user.
Every single friend of mine of Indian origin, anywhere in the world, is a Facebook user. And a great number of my Facebook “friends” are Indians who, having read my journalism, or seen my name on a sibling’s or (genuine) friend’s page, have sought me out and “friended” me as a reflexive act of connection; and being of Indian origin myself, I’ve always found it infernally hard—if not virtually impossible—to say “no.” More:
Here's looking at you in 3-D
The Times, London, reports from Mumbai:
Bollywood’s wealthiest mogul is poised to enter the booming business of transforming 2-D films into 3-D — with classics such as Casablanca expected to be given the full stereoscopic treatment.
Anil Ambani, who dominates the Indian film market but is also a leading Hollywood financier, will soon unveil a giant outsourcing centre in Mumbai that will be dedicated to the process of “dimensionalisation”.
The £25 million facility is the result of a partnership between his post-production business, Reliance MediaWorks, and In-Three, a Los Angeles-based specialist in 2-D to 3-D conversion.
Inside the new unit, 1,000 Indian technicians will be guided by a handful of American experts. In-Three has already given industry insiders a taste of what may be in store, holding private screenings of 3-D snippets of classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, 12 Angry Men and Casablanca. More:
S. Mitra Kalita in the Wall Street Journal:
Ten years later, the world is in panic mode again—and some economists think India will come to the rescue yet again. This time, it’s from the evolution of that nascent outsourcing model into the engine of a robust global player that can do more than serve U.S. companies; Indians can buy their products, too. Indeed, ask an economist who will replace the U.S. consumer and the answer increasingly seems to be … the Asian consumer.
The bookends of this decade are significant for India and its place in the new economic order. The backlash against outsourcing remains a very real threat, intensifying amid 10% unemployment in the U.S. But outsourcing—and the idea that companies must operate cheaply, efficiently, globally—has come to be an accepted, inescapable reality. More:
Saritha Rai from Bangalore in GlobalPost:
Six days a week in the wee hours of the morning, Saswati Patnaik logs into her home computer.
The homemaker — and tutor for a Bangalore company called TutorVista — rises early to help American high school students write English term papers, prepare S.A.T. essays or finish homework assignments.
Outsourcing, of course, started as a way for American companies to lower costs by shifting work to cheaper locations. After nearly two decades, that practice has become so mainstream that hundreds of U.S. businesses — from Wall Street banks to law firms, architects and others — routinely outsource to India.
But now a growing number of individual Americans are following in the footsteps of businesses — and outsourcing homework.
For $99 a month, American customers of TutorVista get unlimited coaching in English, math or science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors. Similar personalized services in the United States charge about $40 an hour. More:
Sandhya Srinivasan in Himal Southasian:
In November 2008, the Hindustan Times’ LiveMint broke the story of an infant in Bangalore having died after being administered a vaccine in a drugs trial. The Drugs Controller-General of India (DCGI), Dr Surinder Singh, halted the testing, reportedly the first time that the office of the DCGI had taken such action. The trial, for a new pneumonia vaccine, was being conducted by a Hyderabad-based contracted research organisation, GVK Biotech, for the US-based multinational Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. The infant had been recruited from St. John’s Medical College, a reputed private medical institution in Bangalore.
GVK’s spokesperson claimed that the vaccine had nothing to do with the death, as the child had received an approved and widely used vaccine – not the experimental product. However, the DCGI’s investigation revealed that the infant had a heart condition, and that the trial had been meant to be conducted only on healthy babies. According to C M Gulhati, editor of the Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, India and a Delhi-based expert on clinical-trial regulations, the investigation revealed a number of other irregularities as well: the informed-consent document had not been signed before the child was recruited; and the St John’s ethics committee had not been properly constituted, as it was not chaired by an external member to ensure independent functioning.
Yet the infant’s death was not an aberration. More:
And more on the subject in the August issue of Himal Southasian:
From The Wall Street Journal
International Business Machines Corp. plans to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees, with many of the jobs being transferred to India, according to people familiar with the situation.
The technology giant has been steadily building its work force in India and other locations while reducing the number of workers based in the U.S. Foreign workers accounted for 71% of Big Blue’s nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year, up from about 65% in 2006.
The latest round of cuts target the company’s global business-services unit, which does everything from running corporate data centers to managing human resources for clients like Procter & Gamble.
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Return of outsourced jobs not good for US: Obama
An IANS report in The Hindu:
In the midst of its worst recession in decades, President Barack Obama says it would be better to create new jobs that can’t be outsourced instead of bringing back such low paying jobs from other countries.
“Not all of these jobs are going to come back,” he told a questioner during an “Online Townhall” from the White House, who asked when would jobs outsourced to other countries come back and be made available to the unemployed workers in the US.
“And it probably wouldn’t be good for our economy for a bunch of these jobs to come back because, frankly, there’s no way that people could be getting paid a living wage on some of these jobs – at least in order to be competitive in an international setting.”
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And click here to read the NYT report and here for The Washington Post report on Obama’s live internet video chat.
Reuters from Bangalore:
For decades, the United States beckoned as the land of opportunity for bright, young Indians, lured by the prospect of prestigious university degrees followed by jobs on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.
Indians have since 2001 been the largest foreign student population on American campuses, comprising around 15 percent of all international students at colleges and universities in the United States, according to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.
But now, the economic crisis that has sent the U.S. economy into its worst recession in decades, has tarnished the sheen of the ‘American Dream’ for many Indians who are opting for university studies and career opportunities at home.
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The veteran head of India’s largest IT outsourcing group Tata Consultancy Services, Subramanian Ramadorai, is trying to ease his clients’ worries after the Satyam scandal, writes Joe Leahy in The Financial Times:
Subramanian Ramadorai and his wife Mala like to show off the garden of their holiday house in Khandala, a lush hill station two hours’ drive from Mumbai.
Mr Ramadorai, head of India’s biggest information technology outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services, points out the vegetable garden at one end in which he flexes his green fingers from time to time – that is, when it is not being raided by marauding monkeys.
On first inspection, the couple’s elegant home, with expansive balconies positioned to take in views of the nearby mountain peaks, could hardly be further from the high-tech, hectic world of TCS. The Mumbai-based software outsourcing group is one of India’s first true multinationals, with operations spanning 42 countries.
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Jeremy Kahn in IHT:
New Delhi: How did B. Ramalinga Raju, the chairman of one of India’s largest information technology companies, carry out the biggest financial fraud in this country’s history? Apparently it does take a village.
And although the billion-dollar fraud at Satyam has been called this country’s Enron, an examination of the company’s accounting suggests the scandal may more closely resemble the fraud cases at HealthSouth and Peregrine Software.
A little over two weeks ago, Raju confessed to padding the company’s balance sheet by $1 billion in cash. But investigators now suspect he was less forthcoming than it first appeared.
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Joe Leahy from Mumbai in Financial Times:
On the investor page of Satyam Computer Services’ website on Wednesday was a box announcing results for the quarter ended September.
The box, which had not been changed since before the scandal began, kicked off with a bullish introduction from B Ramalinga Raju, the founder and now former chairman of the country’s fourth largest software group.
“I am pleased to announce a better-than-guided performance for the second quarter of fiscal year 2009,” Mr Raju said. “We achieved this in a challenging global macroeconomic environment.”
In fact, by Mr Raju’s own admission on Wednesday, the company achieved this by rigging the accounts from top to bottom – and not just in September but over the past several years. In the process he perpetrated a fraud so large, complex, and brazen that Indian business people are already calling it the country’s “Enron”.
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Also in FT:
Business hero who crashed and burned
Less than a month ago, B Ramalinga Raju, founder of Satyam Computer Services, was a regular fixture at India’s most prestigious corporate events.
The man who on Wednesday admitted to falsifying his company’s books to the tune of more than $1bn, in 2007 won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for building his information technology group into an enterprise employing more than 50,000 people.
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India is feeling the cutbacks in America and elsewhere, as high-tech companies and outsourcing firms tighten their belts by freezing salaries and laying off workers. Jeremy Kahn in the New York Times:
Bangalore – After years of being blamed for job losses in America and elsewhere, India’s high-tech companies and outsourcing firms are going through a downturn of their own. The global slowdown is forcing them to reduce hiring, freeze salaries, postpone new investments and lay off thousands of software programmers and call center operators.
While some industry insiders insist the global crisis will actually benefit companies here, as Western businesses seek to cut costs by moving jobs overseas, right now the sector is suddenly gripped by an unfamiliar sense of uncertainty.
“It’s certainly not irrational exuberance,” said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, one of India’s best-known technology outsourcing firms. “There is a lot of introspection about what does this mean and when does it end.”
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The new joint chief executive officers of Wipro, an IT services company, see advantages in sharing the job – but it requires high levels of communication. From Financial Times:
The first time Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe met as young ambitious executives at Wipro in the early 1990s, they had no idea that one day the two of them would be running the company.
India’s third largest outsourcing company was then firmly in the hands of controlling shareholder Azim Premji, one of the founding figures of India’s multibillion-dollar computer services outsourcing business.
So they were surprised when, in April, Mr Premji announced his retirement as chief executive and appointed them joint chief executives of Wipro. In sharing the post, the duo were being asked to embark on a management first for India. Mr Premji would, however, continue as chairman.
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Wall Street’s losses are fast becoming India’s gain, as jobs higher up the financial food chain are being exported to India and places less costly than New York and London. Heather Timmons in The New York Times:
Gurgaon, India: On the top floor of a seven-story building in this dusty aspiring metropolis, Copal Partners churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks. It is a long way from the well-cooled corridors of Wall Street, and quarters are tight; business is up about 40 percent this year alone.
“This is one bulge-bracket bank,” said Joel Perlman, president of Copal, pointing toward a team behind an opaque glass wall. “And this,” he said, motioning across a narrow corridor “is another.”
The banks edit and add to what they get from Copal, a research provider, then repackage the information under their own names as research reports, pitch books and trading recommendations.
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The US presidential hopeful speaks on a range of subjects: the nuclear deal, Mahatma Gandhi, his ability to reconcile Islam with modernity, and how he wouldn’t have put all eggs in the Musharraf basket. In Outlook, an exclusive interview by Ashish Kumar Sen:
On his India connection: Mahatma Gandhi is his inspiration. As an anthropologist, his mother did work in rural India. Considers himself fortunate to have close Indian-American friends. His mother exposed him to different cultures, including India’s.
On Outsourcing: Believes workers in the US have to compete with those in Bangalore or Beijing, an irreversible feature of the world intricately interconnected because of IT. But to make globalisation work for American employees, he plans to offer tax incentives to those who create jobs in the US.
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Rhys Blakely in The Times, UK:
As outsourcing projects go it is rather fantastic: the Oscar-winning special effects for The Golden Compass, the Hollywood blockbuster that took $370 million (£187.7 million) at the box office last Christmas were put together in a thatched village hut in India.
Well, almost.
The huts in question are replicas – stylised office cubicles made to look like rural Indian dwellings. Situated in Mind Space, a vast, grey commercial complex on the outskirts of Bombay, they form the Indian headquarters of Rhythm & Hues (R&H), the leading Los Angeles-based special effects studio.
[Photo: The Oscar-winning effects for The Golden Compass were put together at the Indian headquarters of Los Angeles studio Rhythm & Hues]
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Call-centre jobs were first; now U.S. companies are looking offshore for their legal work too. From TIME:
Mark Alexander, a Dallas attorney, says he’s ethically obligated to do what’s best for his clients, “and that includes saving them money.” So when one of them asks him to research a securities-fraud topic, for example, or breach of contract, he doesn’t even think about applying his $395 hourly rate. Instead, he calls Atlas Legal Research, an outsourcing company based in Irving, Texas, that uses lawyers in India to provide the service for $60 per hr. “When a client pays me a $25,000 retainer and I can save them money, I will do so,” says Alexander. Handing off the work to a $225-per-hr. junior associate is not an option. “They don’t even know where to stand in the courtroom,” he says.
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