It was with deep regret that I had to drop out of the Foreign and European Affairs Committee visit to India last week due to both personal commitments as well as due to the debate on SmartCity in Parliament in both the committee and plenary stage.
I was looking forward to examining at close range the major advances that the enterprising Indians have made in the IT sector, a subject about which I have read and researched a lot.
With India poised to become the world’s third-largest economy, I found the recent best-seller In spite of the gods: the strange rise of modern India to be quite enlightening on the subject.
The success of India’s IT companies in attracting even more impressive flows of offshore business from the USA and Europe has “reverberations way beyond the air-conditioned offices of IT companies in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi or Mumbai.”
India’s software prowess is also considered to have helped revolutionise the country’s foreign exchange situation, which in 1991 had almost broken the country’s economy.
India’s software sector clocked up a milestone in 2003 when it earned more dollars that year than India spent to import oil.
Some IT experts argue that while India profited from the West’s paranoia about the Y2K computer bug, which provided the lift-off for India’s software companies, India’s IT and IT-enabled sector also reached a visibility that was changing the face of the country’s urban economy.
The employment of hundreds of thousands of young engineers, scientists and economics and English graduates on pay scales that often exceeded those of their parents nearing retirement age, created a new generation of consumers with little time for India’s traditional pace of life.
Although many think that there are millions working in IT in India, in fact fewer than one million – that is, less than a quarter of one per cent of India’s total pool of labour – are employed in information technology, software, back-office processing and call centres.
And yet software is clearly helping to transform India’s self-confidence and the health of its balance of payments situation with the rest of the world.
Bharat Forge, India’s largest auto-components manufacturer, is considered to not only have moved to higher-skilled production in order to get an advantage on Chinese competitors, but it is competitive because it uses information technology and engineering skills to design more sophisticated vehicle components.
Although Bangalore is considered to be India’s software capital, its Silicon Valley in miniature, growing congestion problems in the city are beginning to result in the diversion of new IT investments to other cities such as New Delhi, Pune, Chennai and Chandigarh.
Some experts have concluded that the monetary value of the software embedded in a vehicle in India exceeds the value of its hardware!
India’s software companies are also reported to have set up shop directly in China in large numbers.
One of the main reasons being that India’s facility both with the English language and with information technology is not matched by China.
Statistics show that a large chunk of India’s top 30 companies are in IT.
This apart, India has some five or six major institutes of technology.
I am saying all this to put things in their proper perspective.
Regarding the SmartCity project, we have nothing against these Indian IT specialists to fill vacancies which cannot be filled by Maltese nationals.
One scenario we would not like to see develop is that as a result of the automatic working permit clause that the contract with the Dubai people entails, third-country nationals could even be flown in to carry out work which can be easily done by the Maltese and for which there are enough Maltese in good supply to do it. Possibly at the lower end of the scale of the IT process.
The latest PN spin
The latest Nationalist Party spin is that the recent local election results were a blessing in disguise since they gave the Nationalist supporters an opportunity to let off steam, while leaving enough time for them to fall back in line, come the next elections.
From the home visits I am carrying out, I am getting a totally different picture.
What I still need to determine is whether the Nationalists genuinely believe their own hype or whether they are doing so to try to save face!
Anyway there is one sector in which they have already registered an upturn since the local election results. In the sales of figolli! Always according to their party treasurer Peter Darmanin, who boasted to this effect on the party radio station in the last few days.
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Leo Brincat is opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and IT