Questions About Exploitation of Indian "IT Coolies"

[MilesTogo]

I think this thread is an opportunity for us Indians to show and prove that Indian IT industry is moving along the right trajectory. I will post some evidence when I get a chance. I request all Indians to please continue posting elaborate facts and reports on Indian IT industry to show the reality. Thanks.

 

[Kinetic]

MODS: Need a clarification please.. Are we ok now to start posting articles and blogs around economic growth in India ???

Same question!!! Is that allowed? Someone posting BS and giving source to his blog.

BTW I am also working for a global IT company and I am doing good.... hehe.... no 'pressure' on me..... also getting some good salary as a young man.... last year bought a r15.

life is good....

 

[Swift]

First tell me whats ur problem. We should discuss them one by one.

1. Low wages of Indian IT workers.
2. Lack of innovation of them
3. There overtime and no extra pay.
4. Indian IT workers doing mostly coding and QA activities.
5. Graduates applying for coolie jobs.

Note : Feel free to add to this list.

 

[karan.1970]

6. $ 60 billion generated by India's outsourcing Industry (almost 40% of whole of Pakistan's GDP)

 

[Swift]

6. $ 60 billion generated by India's outsourcing Industry (almost 40% of whole of Pakistan's GDP)

How did I miss it

 

[Ammyy]

Code coolies have built a 71 billion dollar industry..the whole Pakistan economy is only 170 billion is it not?

dude some one`s back side burning now

 

[Guynextdoor]

India's IT sector business is essentially driven by low-cost call centers, first-line tech support, simple repetitive code writing, and execution of pre-defined test suites. A typical Indian IT worker is increasingly being called a "cyber coolie" or sometimes a "code coolie", the former term having been coined by an astute Indian columnist Praful Bidwai back in 2003.

India has become the world’s top provider of business-process-outsourcing (BPO) call centers, with revenues nearing $50 billion a year by selling cheap back-office services. The call center revenue constitutes the bulk of India's IT exports.

Harish Trivedi of Delhi University has characterized India's call centers as "brutally exploitative" and its employees as "cyber coolies of our global age, working not on sugar plantations but on flickering screens, and lashed into submission through vigilant and punitive monitoring, each slip in accent or lapse in pretence meaning a cut in wages."

An Indian blogger Siddarth Singh says that "one cannot dispute the fact that our IT industry is at best a glorified labor provider, and our feted “IT Giants” have failed to provide even a single proprietary product which could create waves in the global IT industry (perhaps except Finacle, a banking and finance solution by Infosys, and which is used by a number of MNC banks around the globe).

Siddarth asks the question, "So, what does Indian industry actually excel at?" Then he offers the following answer: "Well, we are the leaders in the so called IT Enabled Services, or ITES. These are basically services such as BPOs, call centers, KPOs etc, which extensively use IT to provide backend and customer services to primarily overseas customers. That our ITES industry is hugely dependent on foreign clients is also not a secret anymore, with hardly any Indian company enlisting the services of such companies".

A recent letter from a Bangalore based Indian IT worker addressed to the editors "The Hindu" newspaper read as follows:

This is how people in the West have started referring to people in developing nations. In the old days, of course, we Indians were referred to as "coolies" because we provided cheap labour. Nowadays, we are being called "cyber coolies".

Why? Because most software companies find it cheaper to get their job done in countries like India and other developing nations. There are many people in the U. S. and Britain who raise a hue and cry when jobs get exported to countries like India — especially jobs related to call centres and the software industry.

The fact that they refer to us as coolies shows that they haven't lost their imperialist outlook....

People and the media are often misled by "R&D" in the name of some of the western companies' locations in Bangalore.

In reality, Bangalore appears to be the code coolie capital of the world...it's not about tech, it's about cheap labor performing low-level tasks at rock-bottom wages. It's just cost arbitrage in the service sector.

I have no doubt there are some smart techies in India doing leading edge high-technology work, but these are exceptions. The overwhelming majority of the so-called IT work in India is call centers or low-level routine software tech support, maintenance, testing, etc. which is widely described as code coolie work. It's mostly about cost arbitrage, not advanced tech.

The call center business in India is unregulated by government, exposing workers to working in small spaces for long hours, close monitoring, and harsh working conditions. This is of considerable concern to some of the call center workers in light of the Bhopal tragedy and its aftermath which are symptomatic of how little Indian democracy cares for its people...be they industrial workers or cyber coolies in bondage who are exploited, held back and their lives totally controlled by foreigners under the "high-tech" and "IT" labels.

Even the identities of call center workers are changed in the same way as were those of the African slaves in the West. They are forced to take on western names and put on fake accents to please their customers in the West for a few bucks. The sad part is that, after over 60 years of independence from the British, some of the Indians still crave western approval and boast about the polls showing high approval ratings of India in the US. It shows that Indians' mental slavery after "globalization" is much more powerful than the physical slavery they endured for over a thousand years.

There are reports that some of the cyber coolies of India are beginning to revolt, according to the Times of London. They are creating “e-unions” and are planning to target British and American clients in a campaign to improve their working conditions.

Some of them are now protesting over low pay and aggressive management that will not negotiate with traditional trade unions, according to the Times story.

Instead of appealing to the deaf ears of Indian government or unresponsive managements of Indian-owned BPO firms, their strategy is to approach their British and American clients for support. Those who refuse may face a sabotage campaign by the same workers who have helped cut their costs.

Haq's Musings: Indian IT Sweatshops Exploiting Cyber Coolies?

Wat Da??????? U actually wrote that whole article coz u found the term 'cyber coolie really cool didn't you? Ur sources? Some random blogger that no one has ever heard of. IT Arbitrage? do you even know what your talking about?

 

[karan.1970]

Wat Da??????? U actually wrote that whole article coz u found the term 'cyber coolie really cool didn't you? Ur sources? Some random blogger that no one has ever heard of. IT Arbitrage? do you even know what your talking about?

May be coolie is a slang for cool dude ?? possible >>>???

 

[nForce]

Seems like Mr Riaz Haq took up an extremely wrong topic to put up his latest fight.He should stick back to toilets and literacy etc etc....

 

[watcher]

Well talking about innovation and product development, many of the products of Adobe are developed/ have Indian contribution... The list include Adobe Photoshop, premier, Indesign, Acrobat (in fact indian teams own the engine of acrobat pro...)

Source: adobeindia.com/work/product_tech.html]Adobe[/url] India: Careers - Product and Technology

 

[billi]

I'm very happy for you and I hope you prosper further.

I will, however, tell you though that the story you narrate above is not the story of the 2-3M people involved in the IT industry in India. The bulk of these people are not paid wages like you. I don't like the "coolie" label and haven't used that word at all. It is demeaning to coolies - who work hard - and to IT workers. But if you've encountered personal success and have been able to buy a house and car, I don't think you should toot your horn about that especially because you are not talking about the vast majority of IT workers. The bulk of these folks work in call centers, or other indirect enablement positions and I guarantee you they don't own a 90lac home.

Anyway, I see you've decided to adopt a very sarcastic tone rather than attempting to discuss issues on their merit. If that's the road you want to go down, that's fine with me.

No no, I live in TO not india at this point. This was just an imaginary piece. Ok call center workers are NOT IT workers they are called ITES (IT enabled services) workers. I work in an i-bank in IT.
Many IT companies spinoff companies with a different brand name to perform these functions. eg WIPRO has spectramind, mahindra satyam has nipuna and GE has gecis.
I agree that the call center guys have it tough ONLY because of the nature of role. This would have been the same for an American call cente worker, because there are things like you have to pick up a call withing first 3 rings, you cannot miss more than 2% or 5% of the calls and need to ring a bell before you pee (ok i made that up). The main problem for them is the timing american time zone ir such.
Also an important thing is this.. many of these are either college kids who want a quick buck, or those who didnt get a job and using this as stop gap or people who have a lower level of educatino, and as you may know there are hundreds of millions of such kind of people in india. They are paid low, but not so low that they cant have a decent std of living compared to how they were. You get paid for what you do, and answering phone calls will only pay as much. In toronto also a lot of immigrants do telemarketing which is basicall call centre kind of role and they make very less slightly more than min. wage. But that is also huge if you pay even half that in our part of the world. So thats how the arbitrage works
Very few stay on to become managers in such companies.
Software companies is a different story. They pay scales are decent. If I go to india at 12yrs of experience I can easliy pull in 15-25 L (Indian Rs) per annum depending on the role (lead or mgr etc.). And the industry pays for the level of expie one has. ok innovation on software products is something indian IT still needs to deliver on but so far no one has taken the initiative. thats because, in any economy people will go for the low hanging fruit. In this case there is money o be made in wage arbitration.
Another point is poor quality. I totally disagree.. if you see the current world cup soccer, there is one company from india prominent behind the goal posts , mahindra Satyam. they are managing the entire system for FIFA (last 10 yrs) and also for olympics. If indian IT deleivered such poor quality , free market will ensure its soon out of business.
Now quality is not such a scare, but Indian it is scared of competitors like phillipine catching up. Even in my office, I see tonnes of philipine workers doing all production support work over he last 3 yrs. they work for much cheaper. So indian IT is desperately trying to move up the value chain in consulting and doing managed services. My bank has a huge tie up with wipro in pune and Cognizant in Chennai/Kolkata and thousands of jobs are done by those guys . In fact my team also has about 20 - 30 staff working there for our projects.
So yes, the industry has to do major work in terms of products and software innovation, but is unparalleed in process innovation especially in the scalable low cost arbitrage.
BUt is definitely not exploitative as is claimed in the title.
thanks.

 

[billi]

“Most Indian (call center) employees have a six-day, 60-hour week, with 30 minutes each day for lunch and two breaks of 15 minutes each to go to the toilet,” said one of the two Indian union leaders. Many Indian call center workers are recent college graduates, or those who dropped out of school at age 20, drawn by relatively high salaries for younger workers — 15,000 rupees a month, or approximately $318.

“The work intensity is very high,” in Indian call centers, Bhattacharjee said. And overtime pay is infrequent, if paid at all, the union leaders said.

CWA and Indian unions take on call centers peoplesworld

No one is forcing them to work in call centres. the nature of the role is such that they have to adhere to some process like this. No one in call centers in the lower value services like tele marketing etc works for 60 hours. for a 20 yr old, even in a more prosperous country like pakistan , I am sure is very very good. I would have been glad if i got 15k just out of college. and $318 is about $3700 pa. Do you know what is india;s per capita?

 

[Swift]

Tell me an industry where every one is paid millions , every one is a decision maker/ innovator. Paid for every extra minute overtime and everything is fare and justified.

If there is one I will move to that.

 

[billi]

6. $ 60 billion generated by India's outsourcing Industry (almost 40% of whole of Pakistan's GDP)

not to belittle pak economy or blow our trumpet. to the rescue of my pak friends, Do you know in 2004, when i came to work out of india for about 1 year, one american store Walmart sourced more value from China than the output of the entire indian IT industry (dont remember the numbers at that time)
So its a matter of time before others catch up. also, remember we have to keep running to keep competitors at bay, and in a d1ck measuring contest against china our only ace is IT industry .. LOL..

 

[Srinivas]

I worked for 3 years in It industry my feeling is that what ever the writer said is exactly true.
I don't think Indian It industry is high end tech industry it is rather service driven doing low tech coding. Again it depends on the company. The three It giants Infosys, Tcs and lastly Wipro are all service based companies which will do the left over works of the off shore industries by hiring graduates.
The infrastructure and the facilities they provide are essential to get the most out of the employees nothing more. I would rather prefer quality work for less hours. I don't think in near future it will change.
But there are companies which are doing high tech projects which are a beacon of hope for India.
Especially Wipro is a worst company of all the three one should regret to join this fcuk company. Those guys suck with their fcuking policies and with their ***** HRs.