Capitulo 5 Outsourcing ( El Mundo Es Plano)

Flattener #5
Outsourcing
Y2K
India has had its ups and down since it achieved independence on August 15, 1947,
but in some ways it might be remembered as the luckiest country in the history of
the late twentieth century.
Until recently, India was what is known in the banking world as "the second buyer."
You always want to be the second buyer in business-the person who buys the hotel orthe golf course or the shopping mall after the first owner has gone bankrupt and its
assets are being sold by the bank at ten cents on the dollar. Well, the first buyers
of all the cable laid by all those fiber-optic cable companies-which thought they
were going to get endlessly rich in an endlessly expanding digital universe-were their
American shareholders. When the bubble burst, they wereleft holding either worthless
or much diminished stock. The Indians, in effect, got to be the second buyers of the
fiber-optics companies.
They didn't actually purchase the shares, they just benefited from the
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overcapacity in fiber optics, which meant that they and their American clients got
to use all that cable practically for free. This was a huge stroke of luck for India
(and to alesser degree for China, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe),
because what is the history of modern India? In short, India is a country with
virtually no natural resources that got very good at doing one thing-mining the brains
of its own people by educating a relatively large slice of its elites in the sciences,
engineering, and medicine. In 1951, to his enduring credit, JawaharlalNehru, India's
first prime minister, set up the first of India's seven Indian Institutes of
Technology (IIT) in the eastern city of Kharagpur. In the fifty years since then,
hundreds of thousands of Indians have competed to gain entry and then graduate from
these IITs and their private-sector equivalents (as well as the six Indian Institutes
of Management, which teach business administration).Given India's 1 billion-plus
population, this competition produces a phenomenal knowledge meritocracy. It's like
a factory, churning out and exporting some of the most gifted engineering, computer
science, and software talent on the globe.
This, alas, was one of the few things India did right. Because its often dysfunctional
political system, coupled with Nehru's preference for pro-Soviet,Socialist
economics, ensured that up until the mid-1990s India could not provide good jobs for
most of those talented engineers. So America got to be the second buyer of India's
brainpower! If you were a smart, educated Indian, the only way you could fulfill your
potential was by leaving the country and, ideally, going to America, where some
twenty-five thousand graduates of India's topengineering schools have settled since
1953, greatly enriching America's knowledge pool thanks to their education, which
was subsidized by Indian taxpayers.
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"The IITs became islands of excellence by not allowing the general debasement of the
Indian system to lower their exacting standards," noted The Wall Street Journal (April
16, 2003). "You couldn't bribe your way to getinto an IIT . . . Candidates are accepted
only if they pass a grueling entrance exam. The government does not interfere with
the curriculum, and the workload is demanding. . . Arguably, it is harder to get into
an IIT than into Harvard or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . . IIT alumnus
Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun
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Microsystems, said: 'When I finished IIT Delhi and went toCarnegie Mellon for my
Masters, I thought I was cruising all the way because it was so easy relative to the
education I got at IIT.'"
For most of their first fifty years, these IITs were one of the greatest bargains
America ever had. It was as if someone installed a brain drain that filled up in New
Delhi and emptied in Palo Alto.
And then along came Netscape, the 1996 telecom deregulation,...