The most unexpected ambush occurred at the National Convention of the Indian Institution of Industrial Engineering in Delhi where I was delivering my annual keynote in December. An eminent scientist preceded my session with a veritable diatribe on the industry, accusing it of robbing all the engineers from the manufacturing industry, turning them into internet zombies and finally losing all its business to lower cost locations in Asia. And after my attempts to clear the air on these perceptions, one eminent former Government Secretary harangued that after killing the electronics hardware industry and using tax sops to steal an unfair advantage over other industries, the cruel software exports industry was now converting all its lakhs of employees into brain dead screen watchers incapable of social interaction and callous citizens of a poor country!

This series of canards and poorly researched accusations was made doubly amusing for me because this was the week of celebrations at Zensar – for our many corporate achievements during the year, for the exemplary performance of many of our associates and our annual cultural extravaganza where over five thousand young people cheered their colleagues at an evening of fun and games. Here is an industry which has set new standards for associate relationships and fair employment practices, given lakhs of young Indians the confidence to be truly global citizens, brought prosperity to multiple middle class families and transformed communities towns and cities in its path to a fifty-five percent market share in global offshore services and twenty-five percent of India’s exports. So what bites some people still?

Some introspection brings the answers home soon enough. The natural resentment that exists when people in their late forties and fifties see people half their edge enjoying a somewhat extravagant lifestyle is fortified by the occasional negative stories in the press about life styles, health hazards of staring at a screen too long and careless headlines like “BPO Employee’s bike crashes into tree”. It is easy to ignore the success of twenty-five lakh young people and over two crore indirectly affected citizens when somebody in your family joins an engineering college and finds many of his brighter colleagues join the IT industry while he gets left behind. And easy too to blame all the ills of the rich-poor divide and the Maoism problems on the prosperous IT sector. As somebody said, the Hindu rate of growth made eminent sense because it kept most Indians reasonably poor and that meant less scope for carping and petty jealousies.

Having said that, we in the industry do have some responsibilities – to keep all our stakeholders happy and do whatever is possible to extend the beneficiaries of our industry, whether though affirmative action initiatives in all countries where we make profits and helping the vast majority of Indian businesses – the SME manufacturing unites, the kirana stores and even small traders enjoy the benefits of information technology. As one more year ends and a troubled world economy awaits us in 2012, let us resolve to keep industry morale high and every IT heart beating for the country we love!



Dr. Ganesh Natarajan is CEO of Zensar Technologies Ltd and Co-Chair of the National Knowledge Council of CII.