SANJAY SAHAY
Spewing garbage and poison, by influential, rich and powerful, in the public domain and becoming verbal or social media diarrhoea narratives, has become all too common in this country. We are destined to this fate and a lot many have gleefully transitioned himselves to this new Indian narrative. It is not limited to politics and governance, it extends to domains; inclusive of industry, that too cutting-edge ones to academics and research. Fossilized in the pre-industrial revolution mindset and practice and totally out of sync with the recent tectonic changes in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, the heads of wisdom are prescribing 70 and 90 working hours, to whom and for what goal no one knows.
Unaware of the labour laws
They are unaware of the labour laws, welfarism, work culture, attitudinal change and the prism through which the world looks at its future. Fixated in time, one does not know for which part of the working class this is addressed. Is it meant for the blue-collar, white collar or just a cheap stunt to hit the headlines? It might also be that they might be fixated on time and space of a few decades back and winds of change wouldn’t have impacted them at all. There is absolutely nothing to comment on the 90-hour formula, as its proponent has plagiarised it by saying “How long can you stare at your wife?” Has competency and expertise enhancement been even on their minds; training, certification or higher education? One can only pity the work culture they have created and sustained in their enterprises.
Cheap digital labour
The IT company in question had made hay on the price differential it could provide based on cheap digital labour available in this country. In simple language, it is known as body shopping. In euphemistic terms, it is termed as the back office of the world. For giving a professional look and feel, managed services are what is touted, all around the world. We barely hear of any tech wizards / experts in any specialisation whatsoever, in the complete firmament of the Indian IT behemoths. They could have thrown up any number of them, who could have transformed it to the level of Silicon Valley. Adding insult to injury the company does not make any software, for that matter, that is the case of the whole Indian software industry. It could be aptly termed as the Indian IT Managed Services Industry.
We can still keep fondly remembering Finacle but what IT products have we given to the world? From the PC age to the onset of the Agent AI Age. Unfortunately, they have not been able to create marketable use cases, which could itself be a worthwhile proposition. Microsoft gained immensely with $1 billion investment in OpenAI, what were the Indian IT behemoths doing, can’t they piggyback? If 70 hours were to be the success formula, then the out of the world Infosys campus in Mysore, would have become India’s engine for artificial intelligence. An open discussion with the world’s best management wizards, can very easily clear this 70/90 working hours mental cobweb. Social media is not the space for bringing in transformative change. The Indian tech leadership needs to engage with the likes of Sam Altam, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang to get a hang of the global AI age churning and road ahead. How much of the huge ESOP-enabled founders’ wealth has gone into doing anything worthwhile in technology? We are losing out on every wave of tech, who is responsible?
(The writer is a former Karnataka cadre IPS officer, Founder & Director, TechConPro, Cyber Security Expert, Professional Public Speaker & Writer. Hailing from Palamu, Jharkhand, he lives in Bangalore.)
