ITs the Road Traversed!

Agriculture being the major occupation of India, what brought in the revolutionary shift to IT field? The question is pretty old with a diverse set of answers. Here is my simple touch to the same, with very few or no industrial jargons used. Let me handle this with an excerpt from a speech delivered at PSG Tech by Venky, Project Director-Cognizant.

1) In 1991, Manmohan Singh, then India’s finance minister, began opening the Indian economy for foreign investment and introducing competition into the Indian telecom industry to bring down prices. He thus made it much easier for companies to set up satellite downlink stations in Bangalore, so they could skip over the Indian phone system and connect with their home bases in America, Europe or Asia. So by post-1991, companies having base or clients onsite, were relieved of the foremost communication problem as they could easily own a satellite downlink with no limitations by Govt Bureaucracy policies.

2) Since then, the borders were almost virtually open. Accidentally it was at this period that the millennium bug started bugging the Americans. Yes, the Y2K Crisis was alive then!! The tedious upgrading it demanded was not giving them a competitive advantage, and to be plain, they found that it extremely boring to modify two digits to four. So they decided to find someone else who would do it for them and infact do it for very little money possible. "America was ready to go on a blind date with India". This served as the biggest opportunity for India.

3) India fixed up the problem in a most impressive way. American began to think, " Hey! when those guys can do even monotonous jobs to this extent, why not we give them the real jobs?!"And again fortunately, it was at that period e-commerce emerged in different dimensions. Indians where now given the "order-taking work". If Y2K issue was a blind date for India , then this has taken the relationship to a higher step of falling-in-love. Americans were completely fascinated by the Indian work ethics and eventually the respect for the Indian IT industry began to multiply. Outsourcing between US and India exploded in a bigger way, rather would be no exaggeration to say that it has become inevitable today for smooth running of both sides. Its the chain of such events that has driven us to high profile jobs as in 'Consulting' domain.

Thus the route taken is:
Blind Date--->Order Taker--->Consulting---> ? ---> ? A lot more to come :) :) :)

‘‘The Indian IT industry got its footprint across the globe coz of Y2K Crisis. And, we never looked back after Y2K.’’