Think Your Job Can’t Be Sent to India? Just Watch !!

When surgeons can be ” off-shored,” we all need to start worrying.
By Geoffrey Colvin

If you think your job is safe from offshoring, think harder.

The election foofaraw over manufacturing jobs going to China—a hot-button issue in every swing state but Florida—was always nonsensical. The overriding reality isn’t that manufacturing jobs are being exported but that they’re evaporating everywhere, including China, as makers of everything become more productive. The briefly flaring media supernova about call centers in Bangalore at least illuminated a significant issue: Service jobs can be exported too, especially as global telecommunication increasingly becomes nearly free. Even more important, though not nearly as media-friendly, is the torrent of college graduates, hundreds of thousands of them in engineering, from Chinese and Indian universities. Earning $18,000 a year, they’re often just as good as an $85,000 Westerner.

Millions of Americans in management and the professions are about to be blindsided by the next step. They have observed these developments with some detachment—a shame about the engineers, but it could never happen to us.

That’s what doctors used to think. Conventional wisdom held that health care was perhaps the least exportable work in existence. After all, wherever you are, your doctor obviously has to be there also. Two problems with that reasoning: The first is advances in telesurgery—using robotic technology, a New York City doctor removed the gall bladder of a woman in France in 2001—and of course the technology gets better and cheaper every day. The second and more immediate problem is the rise of medical tourism. Americans facing bank-breaking surgery are flying to India, having their procedure done in a sparkling new high-tech Indian hospital, seeing the Taj Mahal while they’re there, and flying home, all for a fraction of what they’d pay in the U.S. Examples: A hip replacement that’s $39,000 in the U.S. is $3,000 in India. Heart-valve replacement that could total $200,000 in the U.S. was recently $10,000—including airfare—for a North Carolina man. An Indian service industry trade group estimates that next year Indian health-care companies will take $800 million in business from the U.S.

The offshoring of surgeons suggests a few realities we had all better face:

· Improved education will get us only so far. The remedy usually advanced for job losses to other nations—and I’ve advanced it myself—is that American workers need to be much better educated to be worth pay that is extremely high by global standards. But that advice does American doctors no good. They’re already better educated than doctors anywhere else and about as well educated as doctors can be at any given moment. They aren’t insufficiently educated; their costs are just too high.

· In a global labor market, pay levels will equilibrate. That is what markets do, and the advance of infotech means that ever more Americans are part of a global labor market in which they are the high-cost option. That uncomfortable fact, which many Americans are trying to wish away, means inescapable forces will be pushing their pay down (while pushing up the pay of Chinese, Indians, Thais, Filipinos, and others).

· If you aren’t in a global labor market now, you will be soon. No matter what you do, think hard and imaginatively about whether someone on the other side of the planet could do it just as well for a lot less. No? Why not? If you’re right, how long will it be before you’re wrong? As two billion Asians become rapidly better educated and more experienced, how many years will it be until there’s one of them—and one is all it takes—who can do what you do for a fraction of your salary plus bonus plus pension plus medical and dental benefits cost?

Of course I’m still safe. At least I thought I was until I noticed a small article in the Wall Street Journal recently. REUTERS TO TRIPLE ITS STAFF IN INDIA BY END OF 2005 said the headline. It sounded mildly threatening. I read with relief that Reuters is mostly moving data-processing jobs. But then, in the last paragraph, this: “… executives said India’s journalistic talent also would be tapped for its news wires.”

Well, obviously. India has many millions of well-educated English speakers; some will go into journalism. I have a telephone and a computer; they have telephones and computers. Being brutally honest, I think it’s still just possible they may not have someone right now who can do the various odd things I do.

But for a great many of us, it’s only a matter of time.
___________________________

Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor at large of FORTUNE, can be reached at gcolvin@fortunemail.com. Watch him on Wall $treet Week With FORTUNE, Friday evenings on PBS.

Profits soar at India’s Infosys

Profits at Indian software firm Infosys leapt by more than 50% in the final three months of 2004.

Click Here from the full report from BBC.co.uk.

Stanford biz school woos India Inc

Daniel N Rudolph has been in India for the past three weeks. From the colourful and extremely “hospitable” side of Rajasthan to Mumbai’s corporate life complete with “traffic jams”, Rudolph and his family are clearly fascinated with the changing face of India.

In his official capacity as senior associate dean for operations, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Rudolph has been in India not just relaxing with his family but also interacting with the top honchos from Indian corporate circles.

For the first time ever the Stanford Graduate School of Business is hosting executive forums in India, offering one-day management seminars and executive networking events in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

While the event in New Delhi concluded recently, the next event in Bangalore will be held on January 10 while it’ll be held on January 12 in Mumbai.

“The aim,” says Rudolph, “is to encourage Indian companies and important government agencies to hand-pick some of their finest employees and let them be part of executive education programmes offered in Stanford.”

The fact that some important faculty members — Robert A Burgelman, director, Stanford Executive Program and V Srinivasan, director, Strategic Marketing Management — are also in India to advocate Stanford executive programmes makes it clear that India is a very important market for the institution.

“India has a lot of potential and our aim is specifically to encourage corporate India to be a part of our programmes to further enhance their entrepreneurship skills,” explains Rudolph, who says that companies like Ranbaxy, Reliance, Infosys have shown a keen interest in executive programmes offered in Stanford.

But are these programmes suited for Indian corporates? “A lot of case studies for executive programmes are from India,” explains Rudolph.

The six-and-a-half weeks executive programmes are “absolutely ideal for senior executives in India — usually with 15 years of experience”.

How would these programmes help? “At Stanford, one gets a brilliant chance to interact with global corporate heads who, in turn, will become leaders tomorrow,” says Rudolph.

He says, “Our constant endeavour is to equip corporates with the right tools to improve their entrepreneurship skills through our programmes.”
According to him, “Constant interaction with a world-renowned faculty and other corporates from different countries can help create a healthy dialogue and exchange of ideas.”

By Abhilasha Ojha in New Delhi | for Rediff.com.

US plans to increase H1B visas for Indians

The United States has said outsourcing to India was ‘unavoidable’ as the latter had earned its place as the world’s knowledge capital in the business process outsourcing sector and that it was actively considering increasing the H1B visas for Indian workers.

Click here to read the full article from Rediff.com.

Hey, Big Spenders !

Source: TIME Asia Magazine: Hey, Big Spenders — Sep. 01, 2003

Click here to read the full article.

India makes diplomatic advance after tsunami

Within hours of the tsunami, India geared up for its biggest-ever relief operation, but not just with its own devastated coasts in its sights.

As New Delhi launched a relief effort along the eastern coast, ten warships — backed by helicopters and transport aircraft and loaded with relief supplies — also headed for Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Maldives, three neighbours badly hit in one of world’s worst natural disasters.

A country campaigning for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, India refused to portray itself as a helpless victim.

“India has been trying to convey the image that it is a regional power, and a credible power in terms of having the ability to step in when required,” said Uday Bhaskar of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

“Both these objectives are met with the current deployment.”

When US President George W Bush telephoned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, he was politely told thanks but no thanks: American help was not required. Other foreign governments got the same message.

Instead, New Delhi is sending $23 million worth of relief and cash to Sri Lanka, help to the Maldives and even a $500,000 package for Thailand, a richer country with fewer victims.

Indian commentators like Bhaskar credit the government with a spontaneous humanitarian response to a terrible tragedy.

Officials of the world’s fourth largest military say that also involved in the quick response was a conscious decision to build goodwill with neighbours like Sri Lanka, with which New Delhi has at times had strained ties.

The need to jump in before its local rivals got in on the act seems to have sharpened that desire.

“Obviously, also, we don’t want the Pakistanis to come in a significant way,” one said. Pakistan and India have fought three wars, two of them over the disputed region of Kashmir.

The Navy sent frigates, patrol boats and hospital ships to its neighbours, loaded with equipment, medicine, food and shelter, while the Air Force has flown in an Army field hospital, military medical teams and Navy divers.

The government has also mounted a major aid effort along its own eastern coast, and has not been too proud to call in help from the United Nations.

The national death toll from Sunday’s tsunami, triggered by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is nearly 14,500 dead or feared dead.

Some aid workers and diplomats say that India’s response to the disaster in its Andaman and Nicobar islands has been anything but exemplary.

Foreign and Indian aid workers say they have been granted little or no access to the strategically vital and militarily sensitive Nicobar group, where thousands of people are thought to have died and help has been slow to come for those who survived.

The military has mounted its own aid operation , but a few more Air Force helicopters — and some civilian expertise — could go a long way in the archipelago, 1,200 km miles off India’s coast close to Myanmar and Indonesia, aid workers say.

Within days of the tragedy India joined the United States, Japan and Australia in a four-nation core group coordinating the relief effort.

Foreign affairs expert C Raja Mohan says the move represents a welcome shift towards closer cooperation within the region and with the United States.

“It is the first time India has worked with a great power on a collective regional security issue,” he said.

“What we are seeing is the emergence of an India willing to take a lot more regional responsibility … and it is not trying to do this by keeping others out.”

Source: http://www.timesofindia.com