Nobody knew what would happen when 1999 ended. Would computer systems crash and paralyze machines, power lines, lights, life as we know it ?
The whole world panicked, although the parties went on. The Indians, called in to help due to their sheer numbers, language skills and survival instincts, worked days and nights, often not knowing when one blurred into the other. They, too, partied but the backdrop was often the office canteen. In the end, all was fine.
This was the decade that defined India—and India defined. Think back to the mid-1990s, as software services entrepreneurs assure me, and Americans didn’t know India at all. It is cliché now to repeat the cliché then : of snake charmers and the Taj Mahal, poverty and filth. And so the Indians began PowerPoint presentations with a world map. And assurances of 24-hour backup electricity.
Ten years later, the world is in panic mode again—and some economists think India will come to the rescue yet again. This time, it’s from the evolution of that nascent outsourcing model into the engine of a robust global player that can do more than serve U.S. companies ; Indians can buy their products, too. Indeed, ask an economist who will replace the U.S. consumer and the answer increasingly seems to be … the Asian consumer.
The bookends of this decade are significant for India and its place in the new economic order. The backlash against outsourcing remains a very real threat, intensifying amid 10% unemployment in the U.S. But outsourcing—and the idea that companies must operate cheaply, efficiently, globally—has come to be an accepted, inescapable reality.
"The last 10 years, Indian outsourcing whether software or voice processes went from the Next New Thing, to the default state," says J. Vikram Bakshi, who worked in 1999 at Hughes Software Systems, back then a division of General Motors. Now, Indians have moved onto thinking bigger, he says. "Every software entrepreneur is dreaming of creating India’s Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba.com, Google."
Mr. Bakshi is no exception. The entrepreneurial bug also bit him and he launched Digiqom, a marketing and brand communications company in New Delhi.
Indeed, many information-technology consultants who worked for Y2K-related clients 10 years ago have gone into business for themselves, twisting the outsourcing model into all sorts of sectors, from transcribing hospital records to offering American teenagers help with their homework.
In 1999, Nitin Dhawan worked as a project consultant with American Express India Ltd. His job was essentially trying to drum up business for the company among the U.S., U.K. and India. He likens his own career’s rise to India’s "journey of transformation."
Now, he launched an Internet marketing company and serves as its chief executive officer. iMarketing Advantage Ltd. markets legal services in the U.K. and also markets health services in India. In a sign of the outsourcing model coming full circle, he says, "As a matter of fact, we have been outsourcing part of our technology and content development to Eastern European countries and also the U.S. and U.K."
He calls it a "kind of reverse outsourcing model."
The new mindset, the new confidence, reverberates thousands of miles away. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from earlier this month a majority of Americans believe the U.S. is in decline. A plurality went as far as to say the U.S. will be surpassed by China in 20 years as the world’s top power. India can hardly be far behind, given its population projected to exceed China and its democratic form of government.
That would have been unthinkable in 1999.
But congratulations for India must be fleeting. It is too easy to look backward to see how far it has come. It is hardly fruitful to look forward to a time that it might surpass China or the U.S. as a superpower. What will distinguish India in the decade that begins now is its ability to now look inward, to clean its government, to uplift more of its population, to foster the businesses and innovations such as those of Messers. Bakshi and Dhawan and make their success of the last 10 years the norm across regions and industries. That might just clinch more than the next decade—it could well pave the way for an Indian century.
