WAKE-UP CALL FOR THE WEST : Concern is growing at the exodus of

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 30, 2003 | by Douglas Fraser

Krishna is on the berth below mine on the crowded Kachiguda Express as it ambles through the night from Bangalore to Hyderabad. With his wife he is travelling to show off his five-day-old first- born child to his in-laws. His shirt proudly shows his employer to be General Electric, and that his team has the Sigma Six quality kitemark.

Krishna is designing the next generation of America's trains, working on-screen until late afternoon, when colleagues in Pennsylvania arrive at work, and they talk through design issues for the next few hours.

"It can annoy us that they are doing the same work for so much more money," he says. "But they hire us in India because we are cheaper. That's why my work is there."

In Britain, the image of people like Krishna is of a robotic sweatshop "computer coolie" on low wages. Usually encountered through call centres, they have the vaguest grasp of British geography and comically spiced idioms of Indian English, pretending to be somewhere and something they're not. One anecdote at the Call Centre Association conference in Edinburgh last week was of a British man phoning with a life insurance claim. "I've lost my wife," he said. "Do you think you'll find her again?" came the reply.

How they laughed. But laughter can cover complacency about the potential of India's fibre-optic revolution. Online and on the phone, Indian workers are young, motivated, bright, trainable graduates who are delighted to be earning good money in a sector which, in India, seems glamorous. They can make howling errors today, but they can learn, put them right and clean up on Western jobs tomorrow, reaching far beyond the call-centre sector to high-skill jobs such as Krishna's.

With news this week of Clydesdale Bank joining the eastward rush to access much cheaper labour, and a Scottish academic report warning that the trickle could become a flood, the role of India and Indians has become pivotal to the country's economic future. The centre for this has become the southern city of Bangalore, though its economic overheating is pushing jobs around the country. It appeals because its strong higher education and science base brings young people in and it has a pleasant climate.

Around its southern outskirts, a necklace of vast land plots has been zoned with an expectation of massive growth, constrained only by a dire transport infrastructure. At one company, Viteos, concrete foundations stretch into the distance, awaiting orders. Contract with the company, says spokesman Lokesh Madan, and within six months, a new building will be up with 400 operating desks at your service.

He shows off two such buildings already operating 23 hours daily as US, UK and Australian offices open and close. It looks like the most modern of American university campuses, and here they do high- value financial services work for Goldman Sachs, US Treasury options trading and global reconciliation. They hope to move into equity research, which can be done as easily by an MBA in Bangalore as a whizz kid on a six-figure salary in New York or London.

Down the congested New Madras Road, at the HTMT centre owned by the Hinduja brothers - notorious for their Labour Party links in Britain - Manu Kulkani's desk is one of 800. There are two clocks above it, one marked Bangalore while the other, "Middletown", is on Atlanta time. He is handling insurance forms sent by a Georgia clinic to a US health insurance company. His job is to check the patient is covered for the procedures carried out, and to issue appropriate payments. Kulkani is doing exactly what a US worker was doing three years ago, and this one site is doing 85,000 transactions a day with a claim of 99% accuracy. "The whole process is done here. Only the cheque cutting and posting is done in the US," explains his team leader. Downstairs is one of Britain's new directory inquiries centres, and across the road the company is due to have another 1400 seats operational by January, with considerable interest from UK clients.

A much smaller centre, run by the company Search, is developing a niche in archiving. It currently has a large contract for 18th- and 19th- century books from an unnamed British library with "the equal in software of anywhere in the world". Fourteen people, all under 25 and most of them women, are handling digitised texts on screen, checking through Victorian syntax to reconcile the original with the version converted into text by scanner. An expert eye can take as little as three days to get a Jane Austen novel from the scanner's 98% accuracy to the 99.99125% precisely and proudly guaranteed by Viswanathan, the company manager. Isn't the style of language difficult for an Indian, I ask? "Not at all," replies the former teacher. "I grew up on Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse."

At Next, a Bangalore and Hyderabad company specialising in call- centre training, companies put their recruits through a three-week course including "voice neutralisation and comprehension". This is not to sound American or British, but to be understandable and to understand. Americans have proven relatively easy to understand, but the growth in British business is causing new headaches in coping with its range of strong accents, so they spend time practising with Bangalore-based British teachers.