Ayodya Prasad Gaur was destined to follow his father into the Indian government’s revenue service.
“My father always told me to go into the revenue service. It was safe and you earned a good salary,” he says.
But opportunity came to a remote part of Rajasthan in the form of a multinational energy company that could hardly have been imagined a decade ago. It changed Mr Gaur’s life.
An oil strike by Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy lead to production of 125,000 barrels per day. Thousands of new jobs have been created in a hostile desert region transformed into a mini-Texas.
The Barmer region, where summer temperatures rise above 50 degrees, was nicknamed “Kalapani” by locals, after India’s equivalent of Alcatraz on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
“This area was a haunted place. It was a place that no one wanted to come to. Now the haunted place has become a place to work,” Mr Gaur says.
“Every year Barmer was asking for money – now it’s giving money to the government every day. People are lobbying the politicians to have jobs here.”
Mr Gaur, 38 years old and a former student of geology, had initially abandoned his career in the government for a job as the regional correspondent for The Hindustan Times, a national daily newspaper. Then he was headhunted by Cairn to become its local communications chief.
Remarkable transformations like these are to be found across India’s fast-growing economy, bringing more flexibility and earning potential to the country’s job market.
The biggest changes are in the service sector, which accounts for 55 per cent of gross domestic product and is a powerful source of new jobs. Sectors such as IT outsourcing have put a heavy emphasis on English language skills, as well as computer and internet skills. They have also created modern, clean office environments.
“Today, the entire landscape is changing, with 45 per cent of the new urban jobs being generated in the business-process outsourcing sector,” says K. Raghavendra, the vice-president of human resources at Infosys, the Bangalore-based information technology outsourcing company.
The industrial sector has some way to go to catch up. Yet this globalised dynamism is spreading to other areas, such as oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and the automotive industry, where all the large car makers, such as Ford and Fiat, are now present.
In a country emerging from a socialist past, the security of a government job is still prized. But young Indians are giving up careers in the state bureaucracy for opportunities and rising wages in the private sector.
Another powerful globalising influence derives from Indians working abroad, particularly in the Gulf and the US. Last year, India was the nation with the highest remittances (approximately $58bn). The economy of the southern state of Kerala, which has the highest literacy rate in India, is fuelled by foreign earnings.
Kapil Sibal, the country’s education minister, foresees a time when India, which has a population of 1.2bn people, will supply the workforce for the world, as migrants in service industries fill gaps in ageing societies in the west and Japan.
A young adaptable population, of which more than 60 per cent are under the age of 35, is an advantage, he says.
By 2025, India is expected to have the largest workforce in the world. But a big worry is whether India can provide the necessary skills for its growing economy. Wage inflation is already rising. Honda, the motorcycle maker, and Tata Consultancy Services, the IT services, consulting and business solutions company, are increasing wages by at least 10 per cent a year to hold on to skilled and semi-skilled workers.
Skills shortages are raising the cost base in an economy that has found global appeal through its low-cost labour. An engineer in India is about 10 times less expensive than his or her equivalent in Germany. An entry-level salary for a graduate coming into an IT outsourcing company in a big city is about 9,000 rupees ($180) a month. In a smaller city, the monthly wage is 4,000 rupees.
With about 13m entrants joining the workforce every year, the pressures to train them and create quality jobs is enormous.
An underpowered education system needs to supply graduates who can fill these new roles. According to experts, India produces the best from among its institutes of technology. The rest, however, rank among the worst.
Lant Pritchett, a professor of international development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, says that while India produces an intellectual elite, it is also the world’s largest producer of unskilled people.
A recent report by Grant Thornton, the accounting firm, highlights the human-resources deficit.
“India still lags far behind the developed economies and many other emerging economies in terms of education and training,” the report says.
Manish Sabharwal, the chairman of Bangalore-based TeamLease, the country’s largest temporary staffing company, says these gaps need to be addressed urgently through an expansion of education and vocational training.
His research into labour trends shows huge disparities in employment, skills development and incomes. In particular, there are wide differences between India’s 28 states. Those with the greatest concentration of people, such as Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, offer the least opportunity.
Such imbalances make Indians a people on the move.
“A majority of the Indian globalised workforce in metro cities are from smaller towns,” says Harpreet Duggal, senior vice-president of Genpact, a business-processing company. “Understanding of the global business atmosphere is now far greater because of migration.”
Economic growth forecasts of 7 per cent for 2012 is attracting talent from abroad in a country more used to exporting its labour.
“Repatriation is increasing as people are retuning at all levels. The desire to leave the country has greatly subsided,” says Krishan Dhawan, former managing director of Oracle, the technology company, in India.
Although some are finding better-quality employment, for many Indians the job market has not changed. Most still find work in the agricultural sector, where casual labourers receive less than 100 rupees a day. This sector contributes 17 per cent of GDP, but accounts for the livelihood of more than 60 per cent of the population.
More than half the country’s workforce is self-employed. Only 15 per cent are regular wage earners or salaried employees.
At the other end of the spectrum lies IT outsourcing. It has altered expectations, behaviour and the gender balance among young people. Campuses belonging to India’s leading companies, such as Infosys or Wipro, resemble those of small US universities, complete with volleyball courts and Subway sandwich outlets.
Mr Dhawan says the nature of service-sector jobs has led to a non-discriminatory environment where some companies employ more women.
“The impact of globalisation is very high in the organisational hierarchy, especially at the mid-management level, as the percentage of male and female employees is roughly the same,” says Mr Duggal.
It has also shaken up the working day.
“Today, 40 per cent of our employees are women. Most of our work is not a day-shift job … traditionally, India has lost out as women don’t work night jobs,” says Mr Raghavendra.
Two-income households are becoming more common among India’s rising middle class as couples get used to a higher standard of living. Many more women are choosing to return to work after maternity leave.
Research by leading academic Alaka Basu shows the rise in single-child families as more women seek careers. Likewise, young workers are financing their further education themselves.
“The concept of a 9am to 5pm [government-type] job has been thrown out of the window. Today, you have to be a global citizen working 24/7, all the time,” adds Mr Raghavendra.
Source:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2e56d512-4732-11e1-b847-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1kXEU3CkH
