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Pun Of The Day

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Obama comes hard on outsourcing. Would rescission add to the recession?

What might have come as a great shock to the millions of BPO employees in India, may not necessarily be something bad for them and the nation in the long run. Barack Obama proposes a rescission on the tax cuts to the companies that have been outsourcing their work to India. This might lead to a further dampning of spirits and the Indian economy, adding to the recession's force. However, I would like to argue that this might not be true if we look at the bigger picture.

What it means in the immediate effect is that only those companies that are serious in outsourcing the work to India, where they can't do with their local staff, will continue sending work to India. That in turn implies that the employees working with well established BPOs will be more secure in their jobs and the trend of small time BPOs opening around the country will diminish leading to a better quality of service and better employment terms for the BPO workers that have been working 16 hours a day and 24x7, for peanuts.

There is an indirect effect of BPO culture: kids dropping out of schools and colleges to make quick buck. This is adding to growing population of the non-graduate youth, with lot of spending power but no direction and unrealistic expectations. The non-serious attitude and carelessness towards the responsibilities that come as a part of adult life is growing at a phenomenal speed and we can see a great deterioration in our school level education . Last decade of BPO has stolen from the nation a potential segment of doctors, engineers, lawyers, architects, artists and even innovators, because they have all been sucked into the abysmal hole of BPO.

The self-esteem of BPO employees is always exposed to a great deal of damange by the virtue of the nature of their jobs. A lack of self-worth and diminishing desire to excel as an individual is the psychological impact that most of the BPO employees receive after working in a stressful and non-appreciative environment for long. More so because they are young and of influencable age. This might lead to a generation of psychologically challenged individuals. And thus our nation will be fighting with another pandemic.

Finally, it is time to think of India as a producer. We need to focus on production more than services. We need the intellectual strength to innovate and create things that the world can consume. We need to fire up our economy with the manufacturing industry. We need all these people running after BPO jobs to help build a nation strong and capable. For example, we have not tallest-towers-in-the-world or high-speed-jets to talk about, we have no state-of-the-art museums, exhibition centers or convention centers, we have no space-age transportation, our online governance is primitive and we hardly emploe control-systems in our civil strucutres. The medical services are still backward and non-proactive. So on and so forth. We need Architects, Designers, Doctors, Scientists, Policy Makers, Beaurocrats, and Engineers for accomplishing this, not BPO employees who try to pacify some remotely placed american who can't switch on his TV or start his computer.

I would say, Mr. Obama might just have nudged us into the right direction by declaring a recission of the tax cuts. All we need to do is look at the brighter side.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It may make a bad effect on Indian BPO sector.

Alex

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