Rising Elephant: The Growing Clash With India Over White Collar Jobs

by Ashutosh Sheshabalaya

Overview

Now doing to IT what the Japanese did to cars, India’s rapid emergence as the West’s back office, favorite location for white collar jobs and most recently as a hot medical center for Americans needing surgery(!) is shaking up the world.

From CBS’s “60 Minutes” to the front cover of BusinessWeek, India is headline news. Not just another argument against exporting jobs to poor countries, Rising Elephant documents the surprising economic power of the world’s largest democracy. Could India be the next empire? This is the early scoop on the balance of military and political power for this fast-moving phenomenon.

Ashutosh Sheshabalaya was born in India, educated in India and the US and lives in Europe. This is his first book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781567512953
Publisher:	Common Courage Press
Publication date:	09/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ashutosh Sheshabalaya was born in India, educated in India and the US and lives in Europe. He is both observer and participant in the unfolding story of white-collar jobs relocation.

Table of Contents

	Author's Note	xi
	Introduction: Leviathan's Veil: Eight Myths Concealing the Rising Elephant	1
Chapter I	Heralding the New, New Economy--Another Giant Sucking Sound	7
	A Job Lost By Any Other Name	8
	The Hard Choice: Outsource or Die	8
	'Real Weapon of Mass Destruction'	9
	Reshaping the World: Another Great Displacement	13
	Experts at a Loss for Words: Something Will Turn Up, In Some Form	14
	No Let Up to the Older Sucking Sound	20
	Process Hardly 'New', Although Scale Is	21
	Opportunity or Peril: The Limitations to Cost Cutting	21
	The Demographic Pitfall	23
	Permanent Changes in the U.S. Economy, Departed Jobs Not Coming Back	26
	Not Since Herbert Hoover...	27
	If You Can't Beat Them, Ban Them	29
	Give or Take a Million: Two Billion Consumers in the World's Fastest Growth Markets	32
	Zero Sum, Or Worse: The Indians and Indiana	34
	Fencing the Internet?	35
	A Nation of Fat Cats and Hair Dressers?	38
	Raising the Temperature: Gut Reactions and Short-Term Feelgood	40
	Hiding The Elephant's Hide	43
	The Unstoppable Storm	45
	Offshore Stuffed Back in the Closet	47
	A Job Created by Any Other Name	49
	To History's Exit Ramp	50
Chapter II	From Backoffice to Biotech--How the Elephant is Playing to Win	53
	Hidden Hands Everywhere	54
	More Than Just a Back Office: How Business and Management Skills Add to India's Pull	58
	Show Me the Money: India Moves in on Financial Services	59
	From Six Sigma Management Down to the Call Center: How India Hangs Up on its Competition	60
	The Cutting Edge: Heart Surgery, Anyone?	63
	The Drug War: India Carves Up a New White-Collar Frontier	65
	The Speed of the Back-Office Revolution	70
	Room At The Top, Space Below Too	71
	Plugging the Faucet. Diverting the Flood?	72
	The Strength of the Elephant	75
Chapter III	A Rising Software Titan	77
	'Only a Matter of Time' Before America and Europe Wane	77
	Some Numbers: Elephants Do Gallop	80
	New Kid On The Block--Hardly So: Indian IT In The Eighties	85
	The Nineties: Quietly, The Boom Unfolds	86
	Quiet Opportunists or Too Busy to Notice: International IT Firms in India in the 1990s	90
	Emperor's New Clothes: The Great Refusal to See	96
	1998-2001: Stage Set for Future Tidal Wave	98
	A New Bell Labs, In Just Two Years	106
	How Indian Companies Are Playing Their High Value Cards	108
	The Indian IT Lead: More than Price, Quality May Make it Irreversible	111
	Skills and Scale: The Elephant's Vital Statistics	113
	Big Business Goes Public on India	115
	Not Just Aftershocks: The Wave Continues	117
	VC Ventures Hot on India	119
	End-to-End, Top-to-Bottom	123
	Size Matters: Billion-Dollar Indians Force Global IT Industry Rethink	124
	Just Dropping In? Indian Firms Begin Overseas Acquisitions	127
	Thinking Global? Local Talent Joins Indian Payrolls	131
	Beyond Chile, Nigeria, Pakistan: Indian Infotech 2008	132
Chapter IV	The 'Definite Smell' of Curry--How India Spiced Up America's Hot Industry	134
	Fathering the Pentium: Drawing on a Blue-Chip Lineage	135
	The Early Indian Hands: Sun, Oracle, Novell and Others	136
	Nearly Half of Silicon Valley...And Beyond	137
	The Internet's Nuts, Bolts and Wheels	140
	Harvard, Princeton and MIT--Rolled into One?	142
	Beyond Tech: Riding into Finance, Mainstream American Business	142
	The Golden Diaspora: The Political Taste of Curry	144
	Beyond Borg?	147
Chapter V	The Elephant's Mounting Weight	148
	The Future of Exchange Rates	150
	Five California Counties...or the World's Fourth Largest Economy	152
	Entering the Golden Era: Preparing for Lift Off	154
	The Force of a 300 Million-Strong Middle Class Modernizing...	157
	Running Ahead of Schedule: India's Infrastructure Train	159
	No Solitary Tangos: The Elephant Plays Hardball	161
	India/China: The Asian Centennial Choice	167
	Behind the Elephant's White Collar: Manufacturing Businesses Globalize	171
	A Taste of the Threat to Britain: Tea, Anyone?	176
	Blue Tide Colors White-Collar Relocation Debate	177
	The Elephant Muscles Into Technology's Final Frontier	179
	Do-It-Yourself: The Great Sanctions Strike-Back	182
	Ready to Compete For a Piece of the Arms Bazaar	183
	Shifting the Balance of Power	184
	No Swashbuckling: Quietly Harnessing IT for Command and Control	185
	Making Sense Of Military Spending With PPP	187
	An India That Can Say No: Is The West More Dependent on Indian High-Tech Than It Cares to Admit?	187
	Ankoors Away? The Difficulty of Caging the Elephant	191
	The Elephant Goes Calling: India's Year of Assertions	192
	The Indian-American Strategic Partnership: Hope or Inevitability	197
	Shaking Up Stereotypes: Reversing the Great Absence	202
Chapter VI	Back to the Future--The Indian Context	207
	Is 200 Years of History Reversing for 5,000 Year Civilizations?	208
	Tuning in to Patents, Cultural and Historical Theft: Lessons From the Hijacking of the Fashion Runway	210
	Of Arabic Numbers, Nalanda University, Backus--Normal and Panini	212
	From Hellhole to Global Model: Touching Lives With High-Tech	215
	Beyond Zero-Sum Debates and White Elephants	221
	More Bucks for the Broadband Bang	222
	Made-in India IT Solutions For the World's Digital Divide	224
	And Beyond the Third World...	226
	Globalization's New Advocates: A Billion Indian Stakeholders	226
	The Growing Suction of Trickle Down	228
	More Equal than Most: Doing the Sums on Indian Inequality	228
	A World Unto Itself	230
	Indian Secularism: A World in Denial	232
	The Message of The Miracle...	235
	...Its Challenge and Promise	236
	Poverty Rollback: The Indian Lesson and the World	237
	The Moral Imperative of Growing the Pie	239
	Globalization 2.0	241
Chapter VII	Linking Here and There--Boom to Bust	244
	Identity: Us And Them...	244
	...and Those in Between	246
	When is a Company Really American?	247
	Out of Britain's Dark Satanic Mills	249
	Issue Goes Beyond Dotcoms and IT	250
	Ripped By Van Winkle	252
	Give and Take: Cashing the Post-Dated Cheque	253
	The Sky is the Limit? Not Yet, But...	256
	Wages and Costs: Riddle or Creative Accounting?	256
	Whose Goalposts: Cheap India or Overpriced West?	257
	Exploitation: Shafting Them Down the E-coal Mine?	258
	The Global Contxet of Relocation...	261
	... And its Implications	262
	Living and Leveling--Who Pays the Price?	264
Chapter VIII	Preparing America for the New Age of Globalization	266
	IT Workers	267
	The American Government	269
	Notes	275
	Index	311
	About the Author	323