Much Ado About Outsourcing

“Oh, so you are Ravi Pratap! It’s nice to meet you in person!”

“It’s nice to meet you too, Manjula. I remember reading some of your posts on the Ximian Mono list.”

I was in Boston on a fine Saturday afternoon. It was just the previous night that I had taken the Chinatown bus from NY to Boston to meet up with some of my open-source programmer friends for a day to talk about goings-on in the Mono project. I had met a lot of interesting people whom I had only met online before. The nice thing was that this time round I seemed to be a recognized name while in the past when I went to these GNOME conferences, I was more of a nobody

Some of the members from the Novell/Ximian team based in Bangalore had been flown in and I was talking with Manjula who was the manager of the Bangalore team. It was always good to see more Indian programmers getting involved with open source, whether by themselves or through a company mandate.

“So, you seem to have gone down quite a bit.”

I blinked because I didn’t quite get what she said for a second. And then the realization dawned and I smiled. The Indian subcontinent has, over the years, come of up with its own peculiar uses of the English language and this was one such instance. In India, when we say “gone down” we mean that a person has lost a lot of weight and has generally thinned down, not gone to a lower floor in a building or reduced in height But my weight has been the same for ever now!

“Really ?” I asked. “But I have been the same for a long, long time now. Did you see some pictures of me on my gallery or something ?”

“We saw your website and all those pictures of your engagement and …”

“My engagement ? Oh no no, that was not me getting engaged. That was my friend Nandita who got engaged to somebody else called Rahul, not me!”

We laughed about it and as we chatted some more, I made a mental note to actually label the pictures on my gallery instead of leaving it with vague names such as img_0012.

I am glad I went to Boston that weekend although it was only for a day. I had a chance to meet Miguel, Nat and some of other guys from the Ximian crew. I returned the same night to NY and made my way home.

I must take a moment here to mention the bus service that runs between Chinatown, NY and Chinatown, Boston. These bus services (about 3 of them) actually run buses every hour and you can make a one-way trip for $10! Even a ride on the Subway in NY costs $2! It beats me how these people manage to break even, let alone a profit.

This trip to Boston was fairly long ago – sometime in February I think – but I mention it here because I am currently in “catch-up” mode. Lots of things I should have blogged about but did not.

Since the time I first promised to write about the increasing political backlash against the sensitive topic of outsourcing, much has transpired. What started off as some isolated articles in various publications of the media has blown into a full-fledged US election issue. Why, it seems that Lou Dobbs can’t seem to let even one edition of his programme be shot without him mentioning the outsourcing of American jobs to cheap labour markets such as India. The Economist recently dedicated an entire issue to a special survey of India and, you guessed it, outsourcing. Every publication from Businessweek to Wired Magaine has had a cover story on India, outsourcing and the rise of the Indian techie.

Most Americans (including Kerry, who seems to be benefiting from his stance on the matter) are crying themselves hoarse about the loss of livelihoods and are suddenly of the view that globalization is evil. And it is precisely that which I find so ironic. Is it really the same America that has pushed for globalization and the opening up of developing markets for many, many years now ? Wasn’t it America that benefitted from all the millions of consumers in those markets around the world spending every waking moment of their lives using products and services from American companies ? IMF and World Bank loans to Third World countries came with strings attached detailing how all trade barriers must be removed. Back then, globalization was good. Today, when America isn’t the one gaining, globalization is the worst thing and anybody who believes in it is a traitor and deserves to be torn to shreds on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

The most interesting point is that nobody knows if the jobs that were all lost in the US actually went to India or China. The numbers certainly don’t add up. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that there isn’t a single reliable source for the number of US jobs that were actually directly transferred to India. The most optimistic estimate for the actual number of BPO jobs added in India is 300,000. Even the cyclical churn of the US economy results in 8 million jobs being lost and created annually. Clearly, there is something fundamentally wrong in all the chest thumping going on in the media.

I admit that more than just a discussion on economics and the power of free markets, this is something that affects people and is therefore, an emotional issue. It isn’t possible for an American programmer to compete with a salary like $20,000 – she would be better off flipping burgers in the local McDonalds. So what does she do ? Move to India ? Retrain and get another job ? How does a 40-year old who has made a career in computer industry suddenly go and retrain in something completely different and start all over again ? It does sound pretty harsh.

The truth is that I have no answer to that question. Today, India’s economy is booming and many of us are happy that we make more money and more of us in urban India are able to earn decent livelihoods. How will we react when many years later, we are at the receiving end of something similar? Perhaps there will come a time when we Indians, enjoying the high standards of living that Americans do now, will cry hoarse about losing highly skilled jobs to Latvia or some such country. Perhaps we shall then have a whole election fought on whether trade barriers should be erected to protect our livelihoods.

But for now, outsourching is unstoppable as is the rise of India inevitable. Jobs will move, livelihoods will be lost, history shall be repeated. The world will be a better place for everybody, not just the rich countries, and if it makes life harder for the unfortunate ones who are caught in the middle of the churning, so be it.