It’s IT everywhere

Of late, the media has been awash with reports of Information Technology (IT) personnel in the United States, many of them South Asian, being given the pink slip in the US. In the years since the boom in Silicon Valley, this is probably the first wave of negative reports on the software industry. As IT stocks crashed early this year on the NASDAQ and other financial markets, triggering a recession in the US economy, the technology hype gave way to more realistic assessments. Internet companies, overvalued on the bourses the previous year, started laying off frantically. Giants like Cisco, reporting the first loss in 11 years, put the brakes on ambitious expansion plans and began downsizing.

But the US trend is no reflection of what is happening elsewhere. In Asia the situation is radically different. East Asian economies recovering from the 1997 economic crisis are now spending on technology again. Businesses in Asia are just gearing up towards a new phase of automation and the demand for skills is growing, although at a slower rate than earlier. People who can design applications to integrate new generation mobile phones with the Internet are still in high demand. But there are no media reports of South Asian workers riding this boom nearer home. This is quite unlike the situation a few years ago, when statistics of the expanding Subcontinental workforce in North American software companies were being paraded as proof of the miracles the so-called New Economy would perform for the Third World in general. No one, then, had bothered to look inside the hood to examine the profile of these workers and the nature of the jobs they were performing.