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Tech support for many of the computer companies is
now in India. They talk perfect English and don't understand a word you
are saying. You can't get a straight answer out of any of them. But
they will put you on hold while they talk to their supervisor who I believe
knows even less. Ira.
<BLOCKQUOTE
>
----- Original Message -----
<DIV
>From:
Mano
Appapillai
To: <A title=realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
href="">realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 9:19
AM
Subject: Re: [RT] Leads for employment in
NYC?
I do want to discourage but the reality is that these jobs have been
moving steadily to low-wage countries like India, Phillipines,
China etc . . it's a shrinking market in the USA for routine
programming jobs ; see for example below.
mano
December 27, 2002
A High-Tech Fix for One Corner of India<NYT_BYLINE
version="1.0" type=" ">By KEITH
BRADSHER
<IMG alt=H src=""
align=left border=0>YDERABAD, India — Soon after N. Chandrababu Naidu became
chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh in August 1995, he ordered that
a partly built and abandoned government building here on the edge of the city
be finished and turned into a college for computer software engineers.
Today, the building houses one of 300 institutions of higher learning in a
state that graduates 65,000 engineers a year, compared with 7,500 when Mr.
Naidu took office. The institute is one example of how Mr. Naidu has moved
decisively to transform Hyderabad from the quiet administrative center of an
agricultural state into a computer programming and pharmaceuticals hub that is
trying to rival Bangalore, nearly 300 miles to the south.
With a businesslike, long-term approach to public policy in a country long
bedeviled by populists pursuing short-term fixes, Mr. Naidu, who is 52, has
become the darling of Western governments and corporations.
He has emerged in their eyes as one of the most promising local leaders not
just in India but in the developing world. Big international companies like <A
target=_blank
href="">Microsoft
and Oracle have been setting up operations here in Hyderabad, even though
Andhra Pradesh has long been one of the poorest states in India.
"It's only the last four or five years that this place is booming," said
Maruvada V. Raman, the executive officer of the college, the International
Institute of Information Technology. "These things might not have happened if
someone else were in his place."
Mr. Naidu's successes have made him a hit for the last six years at World
Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland, and elsewhere, where he has
moderated panels and been praised as an example for other leaders of poor
regions. His agreeing to appear is a breakthrough of sorts for the chief
minister of an Indian state. Other chief ministers — whose responsibilities
are similar to those of a governor of an American state — have avoided the
event for fear of hurting populist credentials by hobnobbing with corporate
leaders.
"They are all thinking, `We will get a negative image,' " Mr. Naidu said.
"It is not true."
Mr. Naidu added, "If you do not meet business people and rich people, you
will not get investment."
He has watched the success of Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, and tried
to turn Hyderabad into sort of a Route 128 high-technology region to
match.
Andhra Pradesh has been developing so quickly that although rural areas in
the state still have many problems, the departing Treasury secretary, Paul H.
O'Neill, quipped in a visit here last month that the state no longer even
seemed to need foreign aid. "I don't think he needs any help at all," Mr.
O'Neill said. "I was really impressed with him and what he is doing."
That was an exaggeration. Hyderabad, home to about 6.6 million people, has
become a green, prosperous hub for computer programming, telephone call
centers and drug manufacturing. But most of the state's 76 million people
still live in rural villages where change has been slow, and where a two-year
drought has brought considerable suffering.
Andhra Pradesh is nonetheless becoming an international model for certain
public policies. Some involve little details, like using automation to cut the
time needed to get a new driver's license to two hours from two days, or
quintupling the number of trees in Hyderabad to make it one of India's
greenest, most livable cities.
Mr. Naidu has also been one of the first Indian politicians to tackle a
problem that has effectively bankrupted most of the country's state
governments: electricity subsidies. State politicians across India have long
won elections by promising cheap electricity, a middle-class subsidy in a
country where the poor have no access to electricity at all.
Electricity has been kept so cheap in most of the country that it has been
uneconomical to build new power plants or even maintain many power cables,
resulting in frequent lengthy blackouts that force businesses to buy and run
their own diesel generators. Murky laws have long discouraged private
investment in power generation and distribution, although efforts are now
under way in New Delhi to change this.
Despite sometimes-violent street protests in the late 1990's, Mr. Naidu has
succeeded in raising electricity prices here by 70 percent. He has used the
extra revenue not just to improve the electrical grid, so blackouts are now
uncommon and brief, but also to improve many other public services and to come
close to balancing the state budget.
Under Mr. Naidu, Andhra Pradesh has enacted a law requiring union leaders
to be workers from the factory or office they represent. Outside political
activists have sometimes used Indian labor unions in struggles between
political parties instead of seeking better contracts for the workers. Andhra
Pradesh has also relaxed some of the restrictions on laying off workers,
removing a major obstacle that has discouraged many businesses in India from
hiring additional employees.
To the anger of public-sector unions in a country famous for its
slow-moving and often unresponsive bureaucracy, Mr. Naidu has begun measuring
state employees against one another and preset targets, and he has instituted
surprise inspections. He has fired 50 people just in the state's agriculture
department and disciplined many more for nonperformance.
One of Mr. Naidu's early moves as chief minister was to buttonhole Bill
Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, at a dinner party at the home of the
American ambassador in New Delhi. "I told him I needed 10 minutes
exclusively," Mr. Naidu recalled. "I had a presentation for him on a laptop,
and the 10-minute meeting stretched to 40 minutes — the dinner was late."
Microsoft later opened a 150-person programming center here, and Mr. Gates
announced on a visit to the city on Nov. 14 that the company would expand the
office to 500 people over the next three years. That is particularly good news
here because Hyderabad, like other technology centers, has been hurt by the
bursting of the Internet bubble, although employers are still looking for
engineers with more academic or professional experience. Chitra Sood,
Microsoft's finance and human relations manager here, said that the company
had 50 serious applicants for each programming job here.
Although Andhra Pradesh seems to have received another windfall with the
recent discovery of natural gas fields off its coast, the state, like the rest
of India, still faces serious economic problems. Looking out the window of his
helicopter during a recent trip across the state, Mr. Naidu pointed to several
wide lines of brown mud that meandered across a drought-parched farming area.
"Generally, all these rivers flow with water — you can see there is no water
now," he said.
A small Maoist insurgency has attacked trains and buses for years in remote
jungles in the state. More disturbing, a bomb exploded outside a Hindu temple
here, wounding 20 people, three hours after Mr. O'Neill left the city. Mr.
Naidu reached the site in less than half an hour and publicly emphasized that
there was no proof that the explosion was religiously motivated. There was no
sectarian violence after the blast, as might have happened in northern
India.
Taking on middle-class electricity users and the public-sector unions has
forced Mr. Naidu to articulate a vision of efficient government. He has also
needed the uncommon political nimbleness and even ruthlessness that got him to
the top in the first place.
The son of a middle-class farmer from near Hyderabad, he studied economics
as an undergraduate at a college outside Madras and started but never
completed graduate work in the field. He was elected to the state assembly of
Andhra Pradesh in 1978 as a member of the Congress Party, and he almost
immediately became the minister of technical education, making him the state's
youngest assembly member and youngest minister at 28.
He also became a friend of Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, a famous film star
from Andhra Pradesh, and married Mr. Rao's daughter in what Mr. Naidu
described as an arranged marriage. Mr. Rao entered politics in 1982, setting
up a regional party, Telugu Desam, and Mr. Naidu left the Congress Party to
join it. With Mr. Rao's popularity from appearing in more than 300 movies,
together with an appeal to regional pride, the party gained control of the
state assembly, and Mr. Rao served three terms as chief minister.
But when Mr. Rao, a widower, married a much younger woman who sought
political power on her own, Mr. Naidu deposed Mr. Rao in 1995. He took control
of the party with help from one of Mr. Rao's sons and replaced his
father-in-law as chief minister.
Mr. Rao publicly compared himself to Shah Jehan, a 17th-century Mogul
emperor imprisoned by his son, and he vowed to return to power and destroy his
son-in-law. But Mr. Rao died of a heart attack early in 1996, leaving Mr.
Naidu in complete control of the Telugu Desam Party.
The party's hold on power seems secure in Andhra Pradesh, partly because
Mr. Naidu and his allies speak Telugu, a language spoken only in this state
and by a few people in two adjacent states. He has also maintained a variety
of popular subsidy programs for rural areas, even while forcing urban
middle-class families to pay more for electricity.
But while some corporate executives say they wish Mr. Naidu would seek
national office, he disclaims any such ambition, and his party's local and
linguistic roots could hinder him if he tried.
Mr. Naidu's own command of English is very good but not perfect. He
admitted that he spoke little Hindi, the language of much of northern India,
although he understands it.
Krishnamoorthy Thiagarajan, the senior vice president for corporate
strategy at <A target=_blank
href="">Satyam
Computer Services, a big Indian software company based here, said that Mr.
Naidu nonetheless set an example that could begin to influence other Indian
politicians. "Politicians tend to look at `Can I win my next election?' and if
it takes subsidies, then that is often done," Mr. Thiagarajan said.
Mr. Naidu, he continued, "looks at something in business terms, in metrics,
in measurable things you can improve."
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