Demand and Supply

India seems to be riding high on the IT wave. The world is sitting up and taking notice. India seems to be the one stop shop for IT professionals. Or so it seems.

While everyone is raving about the quality of brainpower that is being exported out of the country, the story back home is not so rosy. The primary reason being that the exported 'material' is largely stamped 'IIT and/ or IIM inside'.

Every year the final year students of several engineering colleges throughout the country gear up for the 'placement process'. This is the time when companies come wooing to take away the 'gifted' fledgeling engineers to their nest. But the question is whether these engineers are gifted or just have a nice gift wrapping on the outside.

The answer is that the companies just dont care. If we are to speak of how the IT revolution is reshaping the Indian landscape and creating employement for many thousands of youngsters every year, we must stop thinking Google, Microsoft, Intel and and start thinking TCS, Infy and CTS. For these are the very companies which have come out and declared boldly, 'We have a requirement of twenty five thousand IT engineers this year.' So, if you are an engineering college, beware! This companies will soon come knocking at your doorstep.

The truth is that in a population of one billion plus population, it is still impossible to churn out a hundred thousand quality IT professionals every year. It is simply impossible. And yet, here are the IT behemoths ooking to recruit so many engineers each year. Beggars cant be choosers. Yes, my dear lads, if you inspired software professionals, are reading this, you are not the beggars, it is these companies that are beggars.

Recently, CTS ( Cognizant Technologies Solutions ) came to RVCE bangalore to recruit. It seems that they were the third company to visit their campus this year. So, very few students had been placed and the 1000+ eligible student population were still virgin territory. The HR of the company on arriving on campus put up his hands in jubiliation and announced, 'boys! come on, today we are going to hit a sixer. All of you PCs ( Placement Coordinators ) are ready right? We need your help.' What he meant was that since they had come early, they would try and recruit as many students as possible. I may not have the statistics, but to my knowledge two hundred and fifty took the written test and some one eighty plus were gleefully hauled away. what a marvelous performance by the college you might wonder. Is it because we are talking about RVCE, the top engineering college in Bangalore? Quite the contrary, in VIT, Vellore, TCS came first to campus and walked away with a rich haul of 526 students. The total capacity of the college being around 1350, this accounted fro more than one third of their final year student community. In such a scenario, every Tom, Dick and Harry will be placed. A 90% topper and a 60% average Joe. The average Joe has the last laugh. What is the point of studying so hard, he says boastfully, I also got the same job the topper was offered.

Last year, at the CTS job fair organised, nearly two thousand students attended and the police resorted to Lathi charge! At a job Fair!

These companies know that they cannot depend on what is being taught in college. And they rightfully cannot when they recruit from some 500 odd colleges. So they will have to resort to training finally. And the students know this too and several make no effort whatsoever to study or learn anything in college. A clear cut case of demand overshooting supply. False inflation of prices and brand value. In spite of these adjustments made by recruiting companies, NASSCOMM predicts that there will be a short fall of 5 lakh IT professionals by 2010. So the story can only be rosier for these so called engineers. While an average college churns out 500 engineers in 6 or 8 different fields every year, an astonishing 80 or 90% of this output get placed in the IT sector. What of the traditional Mechanical, Electrical and Civil. The truth is that these industries dont have such a large requirement every year adn even if they do, the students ultimately drop core jobs in favour of the fatter pay packet IT jobs.

And so the story of Hi Tech labour continues. The English colonised India in the 1800s to get cheap labour and materiels. The Indians finally realised their mistake, demanded and got independence. But one wonders whether it will ever realise the fallacy of this new IT labour that the US seems to be blissfully employing. I very much doubt it.

Disclaimer : This article only conveys the author's views and does not mean disrespect to the IT industry.