Outsouring Backlash- A Myth ? Friedman explains ...

About 3 weeks ago , I had an e-mail exchange with a former colleague and CEO blogger Basab Pradhan on online tutions . The context of the e-mail discussion was my first post on online tutions titled "Extending the Offshore model-Tutorvista .Basab had written to me about the possibilities of an offshore backlash creeping back in the US lead by noted economists like Alan Blinder (former Clinton economic advisor ) ......the notion of the downturn brought me back to 2001 -02 when the IT industry in India was hit badly...is it going to happen again was the question that I asked myself...I read up press clippings and interviews of Nandan Nilekani and the top brass at Infy and they seemed to say it was "Business As Usual" .....were we missing something !! .....i searched the net for possible clues which would give me a better handle of the situation and in this quest I found an interesting interview of Thomas Friedman by Yale Global editor Nayan Chanda. Chanda expressed his concern about Alan Binder's comment in the WSJ saying that 40 million American jobs are going to be lost due to outsourcing.....

Friedman opined that Binder knows that jobs will become fungible and flow to the point where it can be delivered most efficiently....this is bound to happen in the flat world ...The key question is how does the US cope with the job loss ...the answer partly lies in the interview that Friedman has given to Chanda and more details would definitely be available in the third edition of Friedman's book ...

For the time being it does not seem that the backlash is something that Indian IT services is really concerned about , Nandan , NRN , Kris and Shibu seemed perfectly calm in the CNBC boardroom interviews after the quarterly results of Infy were declared yesterday....despite Friedman's theories , and the buoyant mood of the captains of the Indian IT industry...I sincerely hope that we are not missing something here ......