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

Photo: ForeClosureDeals

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.

Barack Obama: New President and New Precedent

Courtesy: Obama Magazine
From the childhood of an ordinary boy to the ultimate career achievement of inhabiting White House with family, has the change really arrived? In America? In the whole world?

I can't help but recall Shakespeare at this moment:

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.

Which one is true for Obama, only time can tell. But one thing is for sure that he holds a great promise for the much needed change that America, along with the rest of the world, has been seeking for some time now. Especially since the economic crisis struck the worldwide commerce.

There are a few things, however, for which I feel like congratulating the Americans. They have shown that they might be late in realizing the need of the hour, but they do know how to stand together and make change possible in spite of their varied opinions. US is not just the best example of fully functional decomracy (even though it is also a capitalist society), they also mean business when it comes to showing the world how flexible they are in their opinions when it is for common good.

Courtesy: PublicRoutes.com

A tussle between the two never-befores in US politics - a woman on one side, with long and illustrious political career and an African-American rookie (relatively speaking) who had hardly arrived at the national stage when he found himself nominated for Presidency by his party, ended up in revitalizing the party and the country as a whole, contrary to what many had predicted as the political death for Democrats in US, when the campaigns began two years ago.

An African-American President in US is an indication that Americans have come a long way from believing that the world was just the United States to accepting that there are other countries and races who have contributed equally in development of human species. Such fast pace social progress is something that one doesn't witness that often.

On the hand, looking at the practical problems at hand, it feels that Obama might have bitten more than he can chew. The kind of change he has promised might take longer than his term of four years. And the growing expectation of the modern world might force Obama to make errors in judgement and end up defeating the whole idea of change he has advocated so far. It is indeed a tight-rope walk ahead for Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats, but his confident smile and carefully chosen cabinet might hold the key to the success.

Let's wait and watch!