India v. China, Again
04/09/2011
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
From the WSJ:
BANGALORE, India-Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.
Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.
In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. ...
Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.
But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India's high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.
Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level. ...
Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.
That's what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.
The Chinese strategy has been to create hundreds of millions of jobs for people to do with their hands, while the Indian strategy has been to create tens of millions of jobs for people to do while sitting on utility chairs tapping on computers and talking on headsets. The Chinese strategy of industrializing first with textiles, moving up to toys, then to industrial parts, and so forth, has worked before in multiple countries over the last 250 years. The Indian strategy of leaping over all that sweaty stuff right to post-industrial jobs appeals to post-industrial Americans, but it's less of a sure thing. It's worked fine so far for the right edge of India's bell curve, but nobody is very sure what the left 90% of India's bell curve looks like. Here in America, we aren't even supposed to think in terms of bell curves, so we are unequipped to even think about the question. On the other hand, with China getting a dozen year head start on India at capitalism, would there have been all that much opportunity for India in industry?
Print Friendly and PDF