[IP] resend with article attached -- Cyber coolies or cyber sahibs?
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 20:44:27 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Fwd: [india-gii] Article : Cyber coolies or cyber sahibs?
X-Sender: suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@imap.team.outblaze.com
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: gurcharan.das@xxxxxxxx
More on outsourcing call centers to India.
I don't really agree with these points the guy makes, for much the same
reasons that I stated in a previous thread (about the republican party
outsourcing election telemarketing to an Indian call center) that you posted.
The root of the problem is NOT, as Mr.Das so glibly states, a feeling of
outrage about kids from Bangalore pretending that they are from Boston,
right down to getting themselves faked names, putting on faked accents and
boning up on baseball and american football trivia to chat with chatty
clients (when cricket and soccer are far, far more popular in India)
The problem is that call centers and the rest of the outsourced jobs coming
into India are way down the value chain, and only interested in leveraging
the fact that the Indian rupee is worth just under two cents US at current
exchange rates. So, jobs that'd rate as the online equivalent of burger
flipping at a MacDonalds stateside are given to kids who get wildly
inflated salaries here for jobs that require not much more than basic
skills like using MS Office and speaking american / just sending back
canned replies using a CRM (customer relationship management) application.
So, while Indian companies fight to stay at the bottom end of the value
chain, and still pretend that it is something much better by wildly
overpaying their employees, sooner or later they will find out what happens
when someone with more favorable exchange rates and far cheaper manpower
(like, say, China or the Phillipines) starts competing for this.
Then, I have seen even engineering grads get into call centers thanks to
spiraling unemployment elsewhere, or simply to kill time for a year before
going on to do a masters degree / get a better paying job. All that talent
going into mindless drudgery at a call center could be far better spent
developing IP, or at least doing something more productive.
Call centers do have the image of a resume killer ... quite a lot of people
will not even list a call center on their CVs lest their next job, and
their subsequent career, be locked into an endless cycle of call
centers. A lot of my friends (fresh out of college, back then, when call
centers were just starting to boom a few years ago) preferred to skip the
year or so they worked on a call center from their CV, preferring to state
that they took a year off to seriously prepare for exams for higher studies
(GRE, GMAT, CAT <- the fiercely competitive Indian equivalent of GMAT or
whatever).
--
Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Manager, Outblaze Antispam & Security Operations
Cyber coolies or cyber sahibs?
MEN AND IDEAS/GURCHARAN DAS
[ SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 07, 2003 12:01:00 AM ]
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=169677>http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=169677
â??The World as Indiaâ?? is the title of a lecture that Susan Sontag gave
in London last year, which was published in the Times Literary Supplement
this June 13.
In it the distinguished writer celebrates the success of Indians in
harvesting their legendary English-speaking skills in the global economy
through call centres and other services. But Harish Trivedi, the no-less
distinguished critic at Delhi University, promptly wrote an angry
rejoinder in which he characterised call centres as â??â??brutally
exploitativeâ??â?? and its employees as â??â??cyber coolies of our global
age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and
lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip
in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages.â??â??
I have been associated with three call centres and I find Trivediâ??s
depiction truly bizarre. What he sees as exploitation by multinationals,
the young boys and girls see as an exciting chance to work with the
worldâ??s top brands and acquire new skills to make a career in the global
economy. It is true that many work the night shift but so do 21.2 per cent
of all American workers. Yes, it isnâ??t much fun to persuade someone in
Detroit to pay his credit card bill, but it does build valuable
negotiating skills. Many call centre employees answer telephones but some
also do highly skilled back office jobs on-line â?? for example, medical
students prepare medical dictionaries, architecture students make detailed
drawings for American architecture firms, accountants prepare payrolls.
And if these are coolie jobs, why are labour unions in America and England
so upset about job losses to India? Finally, Trivedi might ask, is it
better to have an idle son at home or a productive one at work, earning Rs
10,000 a month (and if he is diligent, Rs 20,000 after three years)?
At the root of the dispute is ownership of the English language. Todayâ??s
confident young Indians view English as a functional skill, not unlike
Windows or learning to write an invoice. When they speak English they feel
they own it â?? â??â??its another Indian languageâ??â?? â?? whereas Harish
Trivediâ??s neo-colonial English flies the Anglo-American flag. The minds
of these â??â??cyber cooliesâ??â?? seem to be decolonised whereas
Trivediâ??s is stuck in a post-colonial past.
We have always thought of English as the power language of India. Raghuvir
Sahay, in a two sentence Hindi poem, caught it brilliantly: â??â??The
English taught us English to turn us into subjects/ Now we teach ourselves
English to turn into mastersâ??â?? (which Trivedi quotes in a wonderful
new book edited by Sheldon Pollock, Literary Cultures in History). But
Star TV has now proven that when it comes to making money Hindi may in
fact be the power language. When the old Star News in English changed to
Hindi its audience share jumped from 2 per cent to 30 per cent, along with
its share of advertising revenues.
Yet English remains the passport for every youngster who dreams of
becoming â??â??master of the universeâ??â??. Sontag is on the right track.
Business process outsourcing will create enormous number of jobs in India,
and the first company to employ technology to teach quality English via
language labs in franchised outlets across the bazaars of India will get
rich. So, who is the coolie? Not the confident young person at the call
centre with her liberated attitude to English, but Harish Trivedi, whose
mind remains colonised in the old linguistic categories of post-colonial,
pre-reform India.
<mailto:gurcharan.das@xxxxxxxx>gurcharan.das@xxxxxxxx; post box 3046, New
Delhi110003
-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To manage your subscription, go to
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/