India's Unequal Access
India's urban infrastructure is at the breaking point, threatening its tech boom--and the fortunes of its many Western customers. The challenge is much bigger than money: It requires addressing the frustrations of 700 million rural Indians who have been left out of the prosperity.
CIO — Electronics City is a glittering, 330-acre office complex just outside of Bangalore that exemplifies the technology boom that has remade India over the past 15 years. Over 100 companies have offices here, and the carefully manicured grounds at some of the bigger campuses could make the most coddled American developer jealous.
In an office whose expansive glass windows do daily battle with India’s relentless sun and heat, Selvan D., senior VP for talent transformation for outsourcing giant Wipro, talks about how he is addressing the challenges of explosive growth. To tackle the issues of attrition (the turnover rate for the major outsourcing companies is in the mid-teens) and a potential labor shortage—he uses techniques like hiring and training people before they even graduate college, bringing in 3,000 nonengineering students to learn about technology and offering an array of training programs for existing employees.
In the middle of D.’s explanation, the room suddenly goes dark—except for the glow of the computers, which are protected by generators. Yet D. continues talking without so much as batting an eyelash. It happens again a few minutes later and thus a Western reporter is introduced to one of the facts of life in Bangalore: Just as people who live in an oasis have to deal with the occasional sandstorm, companies in India’s outsourcing industry still have to deal with, well, being in India.
Power problems are just the beginning. Office parks like Electronics City are reachable only by old roads that are forced to carry five times the traffic they were designed to. The result is that a six-mile commute takes more than 90 minutes. Competition on the roads is so cutthroat that most outsourcing companies hire drivers to shuttle all of their employees to work so that they will not arrive completely exhausted and stressed out. (Another major Indian outsourcing company, Infosys, is planning to build a new campus complete with housing so that workers can walk to work.) Power goes out so routinely in Bangalore that generators are considered a necessary expense for homes as well as businesses. And the airports look like relics from the 1950s.
"India’s infrastructure has not kept pace with its growth," says Kris Gopalakrishnan, president and COO of Infosys. "[It] is a bottleneck to our growth."
Someone needs to pay the price for these problems, and that someone is you. Bad roads, power outages and vintage airports all add expenses, reduce productivity and increase turnover for outsourcing companies. These costs ultimately make their way back to the customer. As India’s outsourcers become increasingly intertwined with the core business processes of their customers, their infrastructure problems will be felt in the West. CIOs need to understand the issues that affect their outsourcers’ performance—and ultimately, their own.
