Redistributing Karma

Arathi Varadaraj, an American citizen with a professional background with

Siebel and Sybase and now a partner in Pune-based knowledge management firm,

Kalzoom Technologies, has this theory about why it is no longer uncommon for

successful Indians in the US to relocate and start fresh careers in India. She

says, "As karma stays constant in the universe, so does the quantum of work

effort needed in the information and knowledge activities of the universe to

keep business and industry running. If it depletes from one part of the world,

it will undoubtedly reappear in another part." What this means is that job

displacements will occur not in an exclusive fashion, but in an inclusive

manner.

First, there will be a large category of professionals with global mindsets

who will simply pack their bags and move to perform the same jobs they have been

doing in a different country which has a lower cost structure and arguably, a

better quality of life. A recent cartoon in a city daily that accompanies the

report of a Pune call center employing ten British nationals at the same salary

paid to the local staff shows a young Englishmen shaking hands with an Indian

wearing a name tag saying "Bob" and remarking, "Hey, my name is

Bob too"-a case of the real Bob meeting the Bob wannabe. The new breed of

knowledge workers are truly global in their mindsets and would be happy to get

the "country experience" for a few months or even a few years. If in

ten years, you walk into any software development center or call center and hear

English, American, Japanese and Chinese languages or accents rather than the

smattering of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada or Marathi that is heard today, let me be

the first to say "I told you so!"

The need of the hour is industry-academia-government partnerships, along with a change in HR and faculty mindsets Ganesh Natarajan

Second and of course the largest constituent of the displaced jobs will

continue to be the programmers and call center agents in all the outsourcing

countries that will find employment and displace-yes displace, jobs in the

high cost countries. And this is where all the views that we have aired in

earlier editions of this column-the need for relevant skills and themes to be

provided in academic institutions, the importance of

industry-academia-government partnerships and of course the need to change the

mindsets of HR chiefs as well as institute directors and faculty, will come into

play as more and more young job seekers find their place in the IT firmament.

Finally, the changing nature of the software industry itself will necessitate

a new category and caliber of professionals joining the industry workforce. When

you hear of a WNS setting up a Knowledge Research Center in Gurgaon and a Zensar

committing over four hundred man-months of R&D effort to build frameworks

that will make manual programming unnecessary, suspend your cynicism for a

minute and imagine what this will do to the workforce demographics in the next

decade. Companies will need more researchers than the "bums on seats"

call center agents and many more architects and object oriented designers than

the "we still do it by hand" Java programmers. Seasoned professionals

who are looking for a breath of fresh air in their careers will never be in more

demand than when this happens.

Finally, with more and more successful NRIs, and even those PIOs with foreign

citizenship chafing at the bit to return and put a second wind into their

careers in the software industry here, the industry as well as the central and

state governments have both an opportunity and a challenge in hand to make the

reentry and resettling of a million Arathis as comfortable as possible and build

a new capability profile for the Indian IT industry.

The author is deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies

and chairman of Nasscom's SME Forum for Western India Ganesh

Natarajan