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Food for Thought?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/interference-could-cook-indias-golden-goose/2005/10/20/1129775899533.html
Interference could cook India's golden goose
By Andy Mukherjee
October 21, 2005
India'S computer-software exporters are slowly sinking into the quagmire of
disruptive politics, in the process losing one of their key advantages over
traditional businesses such as manufacturing and banking services.
A former Indian prime minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, this week questioned the
rationale behind allotting government land in and around the hi-tech city of
Bangalore to major companies such as Infosys Technologies, warning such
"favours" could attract public criticism and discredit the government.
Another challenge to India's $US22 billion ($A29.3 billion) technology
services
industry came last week when Prakash Karat, general secretary of India's
main
Marxist party, argued that workers had a universal right to strike.
Karat's commentary, published in his party's newsletter, isn't specifically
about the software industry. It only says that "the working people will
rebuff
all attempts to put restrictions on the right to protest and the right to
strike."
But the commentary provided left-wing politicians enough
ideological ammunition to go after governments in provinces such as West
Bengal
that have banned strikes by software code-writers, because they provide an
"essential service"
Political interference in the software industry, the mascot of India's
economic
resurgence, is inevitable and risky. The Indian information technology
industry
now employs more than a million people.
Political meddling is dangerous because of the estimated $US35 billion
global
investors have sunk into Indian equities since 2000. These investors may
start
worrying if India's highly profitable knowledge industry is threatened.
But the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, linked to Karat's party, is targeting
software companies. These "labourers of the information age", says M.K.
Pandhe,
the union's president, "toil long hours, they work at night, and some of
them
still get meagre salaries". Meagre salaries? Call-centre salaries are higher
than the salaries the Indian Institutes of Technology pay their young
professors. As for Deve Gowda's complaint about giving land to software
companies, he should ask who or what it was that has made Bangalore real
estate
valuable?
The software industry, the Indian economy's golden goose, must resist
political
intimidation with all its lobbying power; that's the only way the knives
will
slide back into their sheaths. BLOOMBERG
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Reproduced from 'The Age' Melbourne Australia.
Nasci Caldeira
Melbourne
Down Under
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| 1st Young Goans International Essay contest 2005 |
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| Theme: WHAT CAN I DO FOR GOA |
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