When Media Is The Enemy

As soon as the news of the HSBC call center fraud broke out

last month, the global media jumped with joy. The joy of scintillating newspaper

headlines, the thrill of catchy sound bytes. What better reason could they ask

for, to whip India Inc. Look at any newspaper, magazine, radio or TV broadcast,

and one would remember that their main message was that India is not a safe

place to do business with, and on top of that, the country's grievance

redressal system is hopeless. 

One can understand the delight of foreign media. But what

pained me was the 'blindly follow the leader' approach of the Indian media.

There was hardly any news piece that said there are much bigger security

breeches happening in the so called advanced countries. There was no newspaper

that talked about the case where bank employees in the US sold some 700,000

customer records of some of the globally famous banks including the Bank of

America. Or the case where a US based third party data storage company lost 600,

000 Time Warner customer records. Or about the hacker in the US who broke into

Visa Card and MasterCard outsourcing systems and hit about 40 mn customers. Or

the story of a routine burglary at a Motorola third party location where

important data of 30,000 Motorola employees was stolen. The list is endless.

According to experts, over 10 mn people in the US were victims of identity theft

last year, and the losses related to IT security breaches was in the tune of

$4-6 bn last year. The US should not be pointing fingers at India.

I was called by a leading radio service for my views on

this fraud, and the only questions the interviewer kept asking me was what would

be the impact of this on India's future. And the only reply that I had for

them was, there are much bigger frauds happening in those countries from where

work is being outsourced to India. The Indian BPOs are on the fast maturity

curve and taking some big and bold steps to handle security.

To put all the outsourcing to India advantages in a

nutshell would not be easy but let me try. The US and European companies are

outsourcing routine, as well as strategic work to India because it is saving

them billions of dollars. These countries are outsourcing to India because the

quality of work they are getting from here is even better than they get from

their own countries.

What the Indian press as well as the global press is doing

is going to harm the Indian BPO industry as well as those companies in the US

and Europe who are outsourcing their work to India. Such biased and

research-less coverage of these events will make it more and more difficult for

work to be outsourced to India, and in the end hurt the blooming industry. And,

the US and European companies will lose out on the competitive edge that they

are getting out of outsourcing.

Finally, I must admit that it might be a futile exercise to

sermon my peers in other media. There is clearly a big communication gap that

exists between the IT/BPO industry and the media — both Indian and global. It

is important that CEOs and their corporate communications advisors sit down with

the editors and their reporters and explain the complete picture to them.