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Tale of Two Tech Hubs: Silicon Glen & Chandiga
securitas writes "A pair of stories about two technology hubs in different parts of the world contrast and document their efforts to flourish as regional technological centers: Scotland's Silicon Glen and India's Chandigarh. The BBC explains that Silicon Glen is still struggling to recover from the technology bust with 15,000 jobs lost in the last year alone. 'Scotland's electronics sector contributes one-seventh of its gross domestic product, directly employs 45,000 workers, and accounts for more than half the country's exports,' which are down 50%. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on northern India and the birth of a technology boom, as a group of government officials, consultants and high technology entrepreneurs is trying to transform the city of Chandigarh from a 'sleepy farm state capital into the "technology hub of northern India."' The city is competing with other Indian cities by offering 'lower labor costs than India's "first tier" technology hubs, places like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bombay and Gurgaon, outside New Delhi.' As Chandigarh competes with its rivals for call centers and software development parks, some of those cities are experiencing a labor shortage of skilled workers. These aren't the only two places with such reversals of fortune - how does your region fare?"
I always thought a fair bit of the high tech investment in Scotland was more as a result of aggressive Government back inducements to companies to set up in Scotland. I seem to remember at one point a lot of the "high tech" jobs were in fact just in final assembly - bolting the real guts of the equipment together after the hard stuff was done in the far east. A policy like that is always vulnerable to some other government making more attractive offers to companies.
That with all the complaints people make about young people working in the garment industry for low to poverty-level wages in third-world nations, no one has yet figured out that basically, by letting technology companies take jobs overseas, we're encouraging the same thing on a different level. Just because it's more white-collar doesn't make it less of a sweatshop.
,marketing jobs or any white collar jobs in
I think you are a fool.
I worked in Bombay for 7 years (4 in Software &
3 in other industries), also in Bangalore for 1
year. Nowhere was it a sweatshop.
My cubicle in Bombay was actually bigger & more comfortable than my first office in the Silicon
Valley - I was a permanent employee at both
places.
The sweatshop like conditions exist only in
unskilled labour jobs - not for engineering
Bombay.
I will be going back to Bombay to work next year.
Dollar to rupee conversions are meaningless when
you compare wages.
In Bombay, I can go to a very good restaurant (a
fine dining place, not the equivalent of Denny's)
& have dinner with wine & appetizers & dessert for
around 10$. If I go to a Denny's like place, you
can have a decent meal for 2$.
I can take a taxi-cab for 15 miles for 5$ or so.
I can pay a maid to come in everyday for 20$ a
month. I can get an oilchange for my motorbike
for 1-2$ all included.
You can rent an apartment in the suburbs for
about 200$.
After coming to the US, my lifestyle has improved
in someways, but has gone bad in other ways -
which is why I am going back next year.
Just to give you a reference point - I make about $3 an hour (about $2.50 after taxes). I think I'm among the higher paid employees and this is in Bombay, where the cost of living is significantly higher than Bangalore - I suspect programmers get paid less there.
Ummm, India's market is quite 'free' and open. Most of the consumer products are manufactured by multi-nationals. India also has much larger imports than exports.
As a developing country, some products do have import tariffs, but this is pretty much the same as any country I guess. Most multi-nationals are now competing in India, and how many complaints have you seen that India is a closed market??
Futher, India is a member of the Wto, and is therefore bound by al its statutes. Many countries have initiated action against some tariffs imposed by India, and these tariffs have been removed/reduced. Pretty much the same as the Bush position on Steel Imports.
The India of the 80's is not the India of the 90's, 00's...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
do not convert rupees to dollars - use the PPP(Purchasing Power Parity) according to which 1$ ~=Rs 8 instead of Rs 50 according to the conversion rate. Going by the current cost of living in india, an entry level engineer who is paid Rs. 25,000 ($500) is a comfortable sum), comparable to being paid $50k p.a. in the U.S. And if you are smart enough, you can rise up to P.L. or higher in a couple of years, and your salary goes up tremendously.
There is one difference though - no one keeps to 40hr weeks - your work schedule depends on the project. I've known my friends back home to work even on weekends when a project deadline is near. It may sound bad, but for young 21-25 year olds, it's not a big pain. It also creates the kind of productivity that took Japan to the top - societies can afford to have comfortable 40 hr. weeks after they have advanced enough (and then see their jobs being taken away by other places where THEY are willing to work 60 hr. weeks)
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
You've got SOME nerve calling India and china protectionists! US and EU are the largest farm
subsidisers in the world and directly responsible for destroying the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers around the world. Do you have no shame at all? Here's just one small fact for you: In 2001, the 25,000 US cotton growers received roughly $3.9 billion in subsidy payments, for producing a cotton crop that was worth only US$ 3 billion at world market prices (One Arkansas cotton grower received US $ 6 million, equal to the combined annual earnings of 25,000 cotton farmers in Mali). Such are the glaring inequalities, that an American cotton farmer on an average receives US $ 10.7 million a day as subsidies. More for pacifying the public sympathies than for correcting the dirty economics, the WTO did consider the contentious issue of cotton subsidies, as if it was an isolated case of exploitation of developing country farmers.
Throw this statistic at your Congressman and ask him why US is waging an economic war against the most vulnerable sections of humanity and driving them into poverty, death and destruction.
Wake the f**k up and stop this war!!
http://www.dsharma.org/trade/america.htm
Here are some general numbers that 15K Rs. a month buys you,
Conversion is almost 45 Rupees to a Dollar.
Usually a shared rented apt., anywhere between 1500 to 5000 Rs.
No cars, maybe a motorbike.
Cheapest computer would cost you around 30K Rs.
If you live out of your parent's home as many do, most of what you earn is disposable income.
Cell phone service in Indian cities are probably much better/cheaper than the US
Bread: 15 Rs.
Milk : 15 Rs. / Litre (around a dollar for a gallon)?
Restaurants: Something comparable to a $25 dinner in the US would be around $4 in India
And last and not the least, Movies, 1-4$ for a ticket and 25 cents for Popcorn/Soda
15K Rs. is much higher than minimum wage by Indian standards.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/ 0,15114,538786,00.html
...There's a lot of hostility." Sudhir waxes conflicted about this for a few moments. Then she slips into
Every weekday, as the tropical sun begins its swift descent over the Deccan plain, fleets of what the Indians call "multi-utility vehicles" fan out across Bangalore. The Tata Sumos and Toyota Qualises bump along the potholed, muddy residential streets of India's fifth-largest city, stopping to pick up young men and women and carry them to work. Then, as business hours begin in the Eastern U.S., thousands of these young Indians don telephone headsets and do their enthusiastic best to help the American people get their Internet service working, figure out their credit card bills, and order tacky limited-edition collectibles.
After years of wondering what all those fiber-optic cables laid around the earth at massive expense in the late 1990s would ever be good for, we finally have an answer: They're good for enabling call-center workers in Bangalore or Delhi to sound as if they're next door to everyone. Broadband's killer app, it turns out, is India.
It's not just about call centers. In Bangalore some 110,000 people are employed writing software, designing chips, running computer systems, reading MRIs, processing mortgages, preparing tax forms, and doing other essential work for U.S., European, Japanese, and even Chinese companies. Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Philips, and GE are among the multinationals with significant R&D facilities there. AOL, Accenture, and Ernst & Young have big operations in town too. Scores more Western corporations outsource work to Indian companies like Bangalore-based IT services firms Infosys and Wipro.
Meanwhile, GE Capital employs more than 15,000 people in Delhi and other Indian cities who answer calls from credit card customers, do accounting work, manage computer networks, and the like. In Chennai (formerly Madras), a staff of 350 design the PowerPoint presentations that McKinsey consultants around the world show their clients. In Mumbai (Bombay), Morgan Stanley has been hiring equity analysts to help cover U.S. companies from 102 time zones away. There are more than 350,000 people working in IT services and outsourcing in India now; the number is expected to pass one million before 2008.
The attraction of the Indian knowledge workers who get those jobs is that they're paid 10% to 20% of what Americans would expect for similar work--and in many cases they do it better. That has stoked understandable alarm in the U.S. Together with China's rise in manufacturing, it is bringing protectionists out of the woodwork. It is also causing even those of a less reactionary bent to wonder just what it is that Americans will do for a living now that even knowledge work can easily be sent overseas.
And what do those young Indian knowledge workers (they are, overwhelmingly, young) think about this turn of events? Sitting on the terrace one pleasant October evening at a swank Bangalore bar called the 13th Floor (which is in fact on the 13th floor of an office building on M.G.--short for Mahatma Gandhi--Road, the city's main drag), I pose the question to a group of young managers and engineers from Wipro: "Do you feel bad about taking jobs from Americans?"
Several of them respond with a torrent of economic reasoning that would have made David Ricardo, the 19th-century English apostle of free trade, proud. Trade enriches all, they say. The American economy will take the money it's saving by outsourcing and invest it in the growth industries of the future. Besides, the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan will all face labor shortages in a few years as their populations age.
"Try explaining that to the customers I'm talking to," retorts Sapna Sudhir, a 28-year-old with a razor wit who manages IT projects for retailers, mostly in the U.S. "'Let's talk about the transition process,' I tell them. 'I'm going to transition your job to India.'
Try whining about that to Welsh steel workers, Canadian softwood lumber makers, Canadian cattle ranchers, Chinese textile workers and Indian farmers. If you *really* wanted a job in Bangalore, get an Indian equivalent of H1B, the employment visa:_ guide.h tm
http://www.indianembassy.org/consular/visa
Chandigarh was developed as a planned city to showcase modern India. Le Corbusier along with Indian architechts (e.g., Balkrishna Doshi) brought this wonder into being. It is not a slum-shanty town, but it is a modern city. Chandigarh already had a great tech infrastructure. SCI (Semiconductor Corporation of India) had a huge silicon wafer fabrication facility that got burnt due to a possible sabotage. So having tech jobs in a place that has had a silicon foundry since a decade is not at all surprising.