No offence meant for any one who works in the IT field and the views given in the blog are the authors personal views.I apologise for anyone hurt by the below material
Every day, countless commentator’s prophesize the ascendance of the world's next superpowers, China and India, the two "Asian giants" shaking off their ancient slumber and rising to the call of the 21st century. Let us leave China out of it as we are worried about India.
We have been hearing a lot of talk of our country being the next superpower and the decorations of our country with phrases like
INDIA –KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY
INFORMATION SUPERPOWER
THE 21ST CENTURY BELONGS TO INDIA
INDIA A CAGED TIGER UNSHACKLED
I agree that the above phenomenon is occurring in our country albeit, not proportional to the amount of hype it has generated. The problem with our country is ------- There is too much smoke without any fire, -----------
The same reasons plague the Indian Cricket Team also. I agree that the boom in the IT sector has given people lot of opportunities which wouldn’t have been possible .It has given people the chance to earn more money in a comparatively shorter time when compared to other sectors such as manufacturing and pharma sector, but we should not be carried away by the TITLES which are handed over to us by the so called Industrialized and Developed countries.
Let us examine the facts first .India is being called a knowledge hub, when roughly half of the country is illiterate, with the literacy rate hanging around the mid to late 50’s. So the question of a knowledge based economy goes out for a toss. Our IT industry is mainly driven a export driven one and as far as I know, no world class software has been developed in our country. Leave the fact that about 25% of the employees of Microsoft are from India, because the Big Cat (Microsoft), eats away the cream.
Then there are the BPO’s and the KPO’s and the call centers (though they form a part of the two).We have the young people barely in their mid teens sidelining studies and hopping on to the BPOs bandwagon .I have no case against them doing so, as its their life, but if we have people who instead of completing their studies, doing jobs, what will happen to our future.
What will happen to our pure sciences and research fields? A country doesn’t only need IT professionals, it also needs musicians, it needs writers, and it needs sportsmen (preferably not cricketers).
India is still desperately poor country. Of the total of billion people in the country, nearly ¾ billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers – one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come.
So let us stop going Ga –Ga over the IT revolution and the Growth of the software sector in our country and work towards a more balanced type of development pattern for the society .Then we can call ourselves THE TRUE SUPERPOWER
I find Robert Frost’s lines very appropriate here
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
Sources: Yale Global online
Google.com
Stopping by the woods in a snowy evening by Robert Frost
