Recruiting India - India has a labor shortage?
India’s leadership in global outsourcing may be in jeopardy unless it increases its supply of skilled workers, according to executives gathered here for an foindustry meeting.
Experts at the meeting of Nasscom, the country’s outsourcing group, said Thursday that an incipient skills shortage was the biggest threat to the industry’s blazing growth.
As the meeting opened Wednesday, Pramod Bhasin, chief executive of Genpact, a back-office outsourcing company once owned by General Electric, set the tone when he said, “If the talent in India is scarce, we will go wherever the labor pool is available.�
Lower-cost centers like Eastern Europe and China could become serious rivals for outsourcing business from Western multinational companies. Until now, corporations mainly looked to India to do work from customer support to writing software code to designing chips. But the supply of India’s famed “skilled, low-cost, English-speaking� work force may not quite match the sizzling demand.
India’s $23.4 billion outsourcing industry accounts for most of the country’s software and services industry, which makes up nearly 5 percent of gross domestic product. The industry employs 1.2 million workers, has sparked a consumer revolution in India, and is accelerating at more than 30 percent a year.
On the sidelines of the Nasscom meeting, B. Ramalinga Raju, chairman of India’s fourth- largest outsourcing company, Satyam Computer Services, said that India produced three million college graduates every year, including nearly 400,000 engineers. “But most of these are uncut diamonds that have to go through polishing factories, as the trade requires only polished stones,� Mr. Raju said.
In a country of 1.1 billion people, raw talent is plentiful, he said, but not all of it is market-ready.
Read: India’s Outsourcing Industry Is Facing a Labor Shortage
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