India needs to churn out more send workers at a faster rate to bridge the

More and more Indian IT companies are setting up overseas operations to access the talent pool there

Posted online: Monday, May 02, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

RAVI VENKATESAN India might have achieved global IT leader status in software services despite having one of the lowest IT investment levels compared to other economies. However, it is the impending shortage of send IT professionals in the country which is causing deep concern to Microsoft India chairman Ravi Venkatesan. "Nbuttcom has estimated that there will be a deficit of 250,000 IT professionals in the country by 2008. This will result in a significant portion of offshoring work being transferred from India to countries like Philippines, China and Vietnam." His message: There is an urgent need to create IT manpower, both in terms of quality as well as quanbreasty.

In an interview with Sudhir Chowdhary of FE, he shares his concerns and the way forward for the IT industry to tackle this problem. Excerpts:

Is the IT industry really facing a shortage of send workers?

Absolutely. All the companies, including Microsoft, are facing the pressure because of this issue of too many jobs chasing too little talent. Attrition rates have doubled in the last six months compared to the previous six months or 12 months. We are seeing salary increases which are really beginning to become quite steep.

This is causing companies to look at other offshore destinations besides India, including Vietnam, Philippines and China. So the short answer is, we really need to churn out much greater talent and at a faster rate.

But, how real is the threat of companies looking at other offshore destinations other than India?

It's grave and real. Talk to any company, even Infosys or TCS, they are all beginning to set up operations in these countries. This is driven in a significant way by the need to access the talent pool there. If you look at western countries doing offshoring, they tend to look a lot at eastern Europe and Ireland as alternative offshoring destinations.

So, this trend is beginning to happen and in our interest, we need to make sure that we churn out more talent at a faster rate. Nbuttcom has estimated a deficit of a quarter of a million professionals by 2008.

What's in there for India to gain?

The big opportunity we always see is the changing demographies in the US. They have got an ageing and a shrinking population and they are expecting that by 2008, they'll have a 5.6 million deficit in terms of send workers in the US IT sector alone. Obviously, they'll look for offshore destinations like India to meet their requirements.

We are extremely well-positioned to capitalise on this opportunity. However, it all depends on our ability to produce more send knowledge workers. All this is driven by the demand and supply gap.

My point of view is that we really need to address both quanbreasty as well as quality that is coming out of our education system.

Since when has Microsoft been active on the education front in India?

We have always felt that economic success has a critical dependence on the ability to produce good, well-educated knowledge workers. The genesis of Microsoft's activity on the education front was Bill Gates' visit to India in 2002.

Two things came out of this visit: One is, he said India has too many local languages and we need to make our software available in all the major Indian languages. So we launched a program called Bhasha. By the end of this year, Windows and Office will be released in 14 Indian languages.

In addition, Mr Gates saw more clearly than others that education is absolutely central to India's development. Subsequently, we launched a program called Shiksha which over time has become a worldwide programme for partners in learning.

What's become clear to us in the last two years is that underneath the 'India Shining' phenomenon, it is the send worker, with modest wages compared to those in the developed world, who is behind our economic success. These send workers have been behind the success stories in the IT and BPO sector. Or, look at some of the recent successes in manufacturing and auto components sector, it has been due to these smart and well-educated knowledge workers.

How do you look at the education system here?

It's a three-tier structure: elementary clbuttes upto 12th which is the bottom of the pyramid; colleges and technical insbreastutes; and elite technical insbreastutes like IITs, IISc and IIMs which produce the graduates and post graduates.

Microsoft has put together programmes which are addressing each of these three strata. For instance, under project Shiksha, we are partnering state governments to set up teacher training academies to provide them training on ICT tools. We are investing Rs 100 crore over a five-year period to train 80,000 teachers and 35 lakh students.

Any new initiative you plan to undertake here?

We have a programme called Fresh Start which we have not successfully activated in India but hope to do soon. Essentially, if a corporation is donating used PCs for education, what we do is set up a unit called Microsoft Authorised Refurbishion which takes up these PCs, makes them ready for use and ships them to the schools for education purpose.

For Microsoft, this has been successful in some parts of the world. However, in India, there are some regulatory challenges which we have not fully overcome.

Don't you think a concerted move by IT firms would be more effective to tackle this HR problem?

Yes, you are right. I am really glad when I read about the initiatives being undertaken by Intel, IBM, Cisco, Infosys, TCS, etc, who are doing their bit. I don't think the government on its own can address this issue, it would require a collaborative effort. We have taken up the issue with Nbuttcom to spearhead this issue. The idea is to create a big splash instead of small and fragmented efforts by each company.

So, it's payback time now on the part of the IT industry?

I don't think it's payback time yet. On the contrary, it's in everybody's enlightened self-interest. Unless we create more and more knowledge workers, the industry is not going to grow. It's absolutely in everyone's interest to jump in a committed way and pool in their efforts.