India or Elsewhere? Certainly not!

Shashwat Chaturvedi

MUMBAI: While everyone at the NASSCOM 2006 Leadership Forum was discussing ways of increasing India's share of the global IT pie, a session titled “India or Elsewhere: Why still India?” saw a lot of animated discussion from different industry head honchos.

Every speaker at the session started out by questioning the validity of the title and then going out to disapprove it. Paul Asel, IFC, The World Bank, spoke about the need that Indian domestic market has to evolve for India to maintain a healthy growth rate.

“India needs to be a better consumer of technology, like the Chinese are,” he said.

Pankaj Vaish, India BPO Lead, Accenture, spoke about the advantages India had in comparison to other emerging players and the challenges as well. “The biggest benefit the country has is the scale, no country other than China can boast of such huge numbers of skilled workforce,” said Vaish.

“The two biggest challenges facing the country is infrastructure and continuous supply of skilled labor, “ he added.

Joe Fernandes, managing principal India, Everest Group, proposed a new dimension to the discussion. “Instead of countries, we need to talk about cities. Globally there are close to 150 cities tracked by us, that are competing with each other for a share of the IT pie,” he said.

According to him, India is a part of global strategy for many companies, which were risk averse and wanting to open up multiple delivery centers across the global.

Francisco D'Souza, chief operating officer, Cognizant, said that, “the question India or elsewhere was completely irrelevant, in reality it is India and elsewhere.”

Atul Nishar, founder & chairman, Hexaware, spoke eloquently about India's advantage in the IT industry.

“China is way behind us, close to ten years when it comes to the services industry. They do not pose an immediate threat to India's marketshare,” he said. Nishar also talked about how Indian companies were opening centers in different geographies to serve the customers in a better way.

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