Outsourcing

Outsourcing- Leading India to the Pinnacle

Outsourcing, the word itself spells an utter rift between the superpowers and the developing nations. The past few years have seen a lot of hue and cry over the outsourcing issue. People in the developed countries have even made this a political strategy to topple the opposition. They have been talking about job losses, ethics, morality, labor laws, information insecurity and god knows what else.

To me, this severe backlash against this out-of-the box business strategy, outsourcing, seems strange. If you dig deep into the roots of outsourcing, you will observe that outsourcing is certainly not an unprecedented phenomenon to this world.

The basic principle behind outsourcing is nothing but getting the monotonous, tedious manual tasks done by cheap labors. Now, didn’t this phenomenon start in Hitler’s regime itself? May be, I am being just too eccentric, but the fact of the matter is that, its worth giving a thought.

Nobody, except the labors themselves, complained when they were being forced to clean the chimneys in Hitler’s dictatorship. Neither did anybody complain when the manufacturing jobs were being outsourced to China. Then why are they whining so dreadfully when the white-collar jobs are being outsourced to countries like India?

Its because of nothing but the fear of stiff competition, and its purely a human nature to complain about the adversities and the competitors whenever we fail to live up to the expectations or beat the competition. And this is the bitter truth because of which the people on the brighter side of the world desperately oppose the overall concept of IT outsourcing.

The fear of being left behind in the competition has made these people so apprehensive that they have put India under a constant surveillance. One wrong move, and they are going to initiate the assault instantly.

Just take the recent example wherein the Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV claimed an illegal sale of personal information of thousands of Australian customers by Indian BPO workers, thereby trying to highlight the security risks of outsourcing. Doesn’t this incident seem like a pre-planned, biased attack toward outsourcing?

Yes, it is true that security of information is a major concern, but it certainly does not mean that banning outsourcing altogether will ensure complete security of information. The security breaches simply demand that stringent measures are needed to address the problem of people and not corporate or national boundaries. And India has already started responding to the alarm.

The Indian offshore outsourcing companies have started training their staff on cyber ethics with an emphasis on cyber law education. In addition, the Indian IT Act of information security and cyber crime is also being updated with fresh amendments from NASSCOM. And these measures have already begun showing results.

The case wherein the Indian police arrested former employees of an Indian call center for allegedly stealing consumers’ funds bears a testimony to the fact. Although such an incident is unfortunate in itself, the fact that it was handled successfully highlights and reaffirms the existence of an effective framework of laws and a commitment to enforcing them in India.

All the backlash and daemons of outsourcing notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is, no IT savvy or a visionary in any area of specialization in the world can ill-afford to overlook the virtues of outsourcing. The driving phenomenon of outsourcing has had numerous derivatives during its realization and evolution including the rift from capital-intensive processes to knowledge and skill exhaustive processes. Consequently, such developments shift the focus from the current fury of outsourcing to the figures and facts, which point to only one direction – India.
But irrespective of whatever is being said or done, the bottom line is that, outsourcing shall prevail as long as this world is being governed by Charles Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest”. And this gives India the opportunity to take the world head on and rise to the pinnacle.

posted by navneet biet @ 10:48 PM 0 comments