The Thief of Bangalore
We thought the branding problem was a transient one that, once solved, would not bug us anymore. But creating brand India Inc. was turning out to be riding on a never-ending circle. We realized the severity of the problem when we first heard the American term ‘Bangalored’. It was used to describe people losing their jobs to Indians.
From Y2K heroes, we had become job-stealing thieves. I could never have imagined that our branding success was a branding problem in itself. So much so that the phenomenon even made it to popular culture across the globe! In the US, they made sitcoms titled Silicon Valley (which ran for six seasons) and Outsourced (which ran for one season). In the UK, they made The IT Crowd (which ran for five seasons).
Indian engineers had come to love the idea of going abroad for a project. Their reasons varied.
Often, the attraction lay in the promise of a higher salary and cultural exposure. Then there was always the set of pragmatic Indians who wished to put in a few years of hardship to stack up on savings. Unlike them, there were Indians who sought some years of fun before settling down with responsibility. A few planned to settle down in the US for good.
In the initial years of NASSCOM, H-1B US visas were big on the agenda. It took up most of the discussion time in EC meetings. In those days, Indian software services only did on-site projects, which came to be known as body shopping. To serve international businesses, highly educated and qualified Indian engineers had to first be trained by the clients and then placed in their offices. This meant that a company’s income was proportional to the number of H-1B visas it acquired. In the beginning, Indian engineers only provided services involving skills like COBOL, Fortran, RPG or data migration. But once they were trained, they were thrice as productive as their American counterparts. We had started out by using business visas. With these, engineers could go to the US for a short term. However, the arrangement failed us for longer projects. As the business and the impact delivered by
Indian engineers grew, both Indian companies and their American clients wanted a practical alternative where talent could stay and work in the US for a longer duration.
This led to the creation of the H-1B visa in 1990 under US immigration laws. About 65,000 H-1B visas were made available for
the year. These could be issued to highly skilled professionals who satisfy certain criteria. At that time, giants like Microsoft and IBM were among the largest users of H-1B.
H-1B set the stage for the coming of India’s ‘global delivery model’. Most Indian software services companies had over 80 per cent of revenues coming from on-site work.
Ironically, in the US, the very same visas had sparked a debate on outsourcing. Politicians thrived by creating fictitious challenges, and India was a target every time an election was around the corner in the US. Till date, India continues to be accused of stealing American jobs and continues to fight loud hate campaigns.
If NASSCOM had to do something about the H-1B controversies, it would have to first address the branding problem. We dropped the term ‘outsourcing’ and positioned India as a trusted business partner. We recast ‘business process outsourcing’ (BPO) as ‘business process management’ (BPM). We explained to the Americans that by bringing efficiency to their industries, we were growing their economy, catalysing growth and improving their business environment. Consequently, we were creating more jobs than we were eating into. A McKinsey global study had found that for every dollar that the US spent on outsourcing, it earned back $1.4.
It took years of effort to change perceptions, but we kept at it. Over the years, in spite of the political backlash in the US, the number of H-1B visas taken up by Indians has kept growing.
Even today, the outsourcing debates persist, but the way Americans interact with Indians has completely transformed.
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