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A few software billionaires have become national heroes. For a brief period this year, Wipro's Premji was the second richest man in the world, after Bill Gates. (Wipro's stock price subsided in April, though Premji's net worth is still estimated at more than $11 billion.) The techno-tycoons are admired because they have earned fortunes in one of the world's most competitive industries without any under-the-counter help from Indian bureaucrats. In the early 1990s, in fact, the software lobby got the government to remove import duties intended to protect local firms from software products sold in India by Western companies. "We said that if we can't compete with multinationals in India, how will we ever be able to compete outside," says NASSCOM's Mehta. It was a winning strategy. The Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. gives a "top-quality" ranking to only 32 software companies around the world; 17 of them are based in India.
Software is only the more prominent half of India's IT bonanza. A glimpse of the other big new line of business can be found at Selectronic, a three-year-old New Delhi company where young Indian workers are paid to watch American TV programs like ER and Chicago Hope as part of their job training. Selectronic also hires stenographers to transcribe medical records for doctors in California, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Without the Internet, that vast distance was unbridgeable; with the Net in place, a whole range of labor-intensive work--or "IT-enabled services"--can be done anywhere on the globe. Ireland and the Philippines have also caught on, but India is becoming the international leader.
Selectronic's business works like this: to protect themselves in malpractice suits, doctors in the U.S. have to keep detailed notes of all consultations but don't want to hire stenographers at U.S. wage rates. Indians charge far less for the same work--and the Internet has brought them within reach. A doctor in the U.S. simply dials a toll-free number and dictates case summaries into the phone. Those recordings are transmitted via satellite to New Delhi, where they are typed by Selectronic's 200 transcribers.
Founder Veer Sagar, who left a computer company to get into the business, says his service has more potential for growth than software because it can employ Indians with nonspecialized education. Some 100 Indian companies are doing medical transcription already, and Selectronic operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year--a claim that Indian power companies and telephone exchanges can barely make. There are challenges to the job. Speed is a must; the company promises a 24-hour turnaround. So, too, is accuracy, and that poses challenges for Indians dealing with American English, which is why those U.S. TV programs are part of the training program. One worker couldn't understand a case history that involved a patient who ate a tortilla--so the company imported restaurant menus from the U.S. for study.
In Bombay, 940 people sit at terminals in a huge, air-conditioned hall, working for World Network Services, a unit of British Airways. They perform a variety of long-distance functions--tracking cargo, processing reservations, collating sales--for BA and other carriers. Qualifications for the jobs aren't high. Anyone who knows English and can use a keyboard can apply. WNS general manager Roy Marshall says the company looked at several countries before settling on India. The main reason: so many people speak English that expansion would never be a problem.
The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that the number of jobs in India's software and IT-services sector will jump from 280,000 last year to 2.2 million by 2008. "For people who are educated, speak English and have some basic skills," says Salil Parikh, CEO of Ernst & Young's Indian consulting operation, "it will be a great life."
--Reported by Meenakshi Ganguly/ Bombay, Saritha Rai/ Bangalore and Maseeh Rahman/New Delhi