Then the tide turned. Last March a labor-hungry Internet portal based in New Delhi gave Dubey a job editing online stories about women's fashion. He was hardly an expert, but, hey, it was his first work in 18 months. Within a couple of weeks, two other Internet-related companies tried to poach him. Today he makes $475 a month, three times the salary of a doctor right out of medical school, and his parents are getting marriage offers from families with available daughters. Dubey is the content manager for a portal providing crop and weather information for Indian farmers. Jobs like his didn't even exist in India a year or so ago. But they do now, because India's Internet economy is becoming a success story of global proportions.
India's prowess in information technology isn't a new phenomenon. For years, the southern city of Bangalore has been a high-tech oasis where Indians write code for international tech giants and export software to the world. But the Net promises to push the IT boom into India's mainstream. Cities like Hyderabad, Bombay and New Delhi are promising telecom links and tax holidays to prospective business investors. "India always had the talent, but with the Internet, we've found the delivery mechanism to transport this talent around the globe," says Prakash Gurbaxani, who set up his own dotcom consultancy, 24/7 Customer.com, five months ago in Bangalore.
Unexpectedly and unintentionally, India has found a future. In the past quarter-century, the economy has stagnated behind varying degrees of industrial protectionism that left the country undercapitalized, uncompetitive and underemployed. The country of 1 billion people has only 4.3 million PCs; the phone network is Third World at its worst. India's capacity for international telecom traffic will this year reach 780 megabits per second, a mere 1.4% of what's available in China. E-commerce is but a distant dream.
One of the beneficiaries of that backwardness is the U.S., which has attracted top-flight Indian techies and entrepreneurs with minimal effort to feed its hungry high-tech sector. But the Internet has begun to sneak through the barriers India erected against the outside world. Now the largest national pool of engineering talent in the developing world, a good proportion of which speaks English, is able to set up shop at home. Those engineers' underemployed sisters and cousins have proved willing to work cheaply at a new crop of labor-intensive jobs made possible by the distance-bridging technology of the Net. "Finally, India has something to show to the world," says Dewang Mehta, president of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).
To date, the bonanza for India has come from the equivalent of the Internet's boiler room--writing code and other labor-intensive work. But that's Big Business in its own right, employing more than 50,000 people and expected to provide more than a million jobs by 2008. Indian software exports have grown from $50 million in 1993 to $6.3 billion this year. Ramalinga Raju, billionaire chairman of Satyam Computer Services, says those opportunities could eventually give India 5% of the worldwide opportunities in IT and create up to 50 million jobs in the next two decades.
The key to those aspirations is the unsightly tangle of TV cable connections that are strung across balconies and laundry lines in every Indian city. In the '90s, they were installed to bring cable TV to urban Indians. These days, they're being transformed into broadband Internet connections. There are 30 million cable connections--compared with 20 million telephone lines; 2 million people in Bombay have high-speed access to the Internet, often by way of a television set, not an expensive PC. (There are 75 million TVs in India.) A slew of companies, including Enron and Hughes Telecom, are building fiber-optic networks to boost those numbers.
Wages are still low in India, but they are a lot higher than in the past, and the result is a growing middle techno-class. Rohini Ramdas and Rohit Mani are a young Bangalore couple, married just eight months and facing the usual struggles of trying to furnish an apartment and make the monthly car payments. They are software engineers at a subsidiary of ANZ Grindlays Bank. They work long hours for a combined income of nearly $17,000 a year, though annual raises can reach 50%. "This industry is so cushy, so comfortable," Mani says. "My peers in manufacturing have to claw their way up the ladder." The couple bank 25% of their earnings.