I have your job

As a bystander, I have heard and read a lot about the out sourcing business. It is one of the key drivers of the Indian economies. It is one of the main employment sources for the urban and semi-urban youth. It is an instrumental factor in the development of "B" towns, as the smaller towns of India are called. In short, Outsourcing is good for India.

So it is natural that public outrage against India in the US as the main cause of umemplyment was discredited by me totally. Hey, you guys want to keep your costs low. So you come to India in search of cheap but quality labour, something sorely missing in your own country. If anyone is to be blamed for the loss of jobs in US, it is the head of all the corporations who decided to outsource tasks...not India, definitely not my India.

As an auditor, one of my last projects with my previous employers was to perform a SOx (Sarbanes Oxley, for the uninitiated) assignment for India's second largest BPO. As a part of the assignment, I travelled to the hamlet, it was not more than that, of Ipswich in England. The office there wore a forlorn look. The floor which could have seated nearly 30 people was manned by less than half that number. The operations person from India who was accompanying us to explain the nuances of the business to us revealed that a number of people in UK had lost their jobs when a major part of the activities, hitherto carried out in Ipswich, were shifted to India. But the impact of outsourcing didn't strike me then as I didn't know the people who had been fired as a result of the outsourcing and I did know the guys in India to whom the jobs had been outsourced. I had seen only one side of the coin and that side was quite rosy.

Ironically, my first assignment with my new employer was exactly of the same nature, albeit for the largest BPO in India. I travelled to Mexico, to a town called Juarez, across the US border town of El Paso. I tagged along with a guy who would help in the transition. A transition is a process of transferring the process and jobs from the client organization to the BPO. As a part of the kick off meeting, one of the questions that my colleague asked was that he hoped that the employees who we were to interview realised that their jobs would be outsourced and that they were OK with it.

It is then that it struck me. I was nvere so violently ashamed of myself as I was at that moment. True, I did not directly do anything to these people. But I felt like a co-conspirator in a very ugly plot to fire a few good souls.

Over the next 4 days I met the three employees whose jobs were to be transitioned to India to be done by a one or two people at half their cost. A chubby Taurean female with a lovely eight year old girl, a beautiful young brunnette who was in love with everything pink and a lively young man born and raised in Juarez. At the end of 4 days, I had shared Indian cultures and tranditions with them, I had shared holiday and family pictures with them, I had shared meals with them..I had bonded with them. And to think that something i was doing would some months down the line lead to them losing their jobs. The heart ache was reduced considerably as there had been alternate arrnagements for these three employees. But it could easily have been a situation where these people I met for a brief period and who treated me so well and were so kind and nice to me, were unemployed because of something that I did.

I really wonder how can we live with ourselves when we know that we may be the sole reason that a family is in economic doldrums.. someone out there is out on the streets because we snatched their jobs!

In perspective, I think that this is an economic issue, a issue of practicality, of business, of survival, if you will. Its a dog eat dog world out there and we - India, are ready to be hunting down and eating anything that comes in our way.. Somehow, that is not the Indian-ness that I hold in my heart...maybe I am in the wrong century.