Bunty Aur Babli January 13, 2006

This story needs to be told. Professor Anirudh Krishna teaches at Duke University. Before joining the world of academia, Anirudh was an IAS officer for many years. His area of work has been poverty alleviation. It has engaged him even after leaving the IAS, and today he has extended his study beyond India. In India, he has been studying how and why people escape from or fall into poverty in villages of Rajasthan and Karnataka. When we met through a common friend, we were both very interested to find out the inter-generational background of the average Indian software engineer. We conducted two interesting exercises. I conducted one within MindTree, with some help from the AC Nielsen group. The other one was done under Anirudh’s stewardship, using a broader sample. We took engineers from the Philips Innovation Centre in Bangalore and employees at Sasken. The results of both studies need to be told. First, a look at the two studies themselves.Recently, when a batch of hundred fresh engineers joined MindTree, anonymous feedback was taken on various demographic indices including parental occupations and income patterns. An overwhelming 33% came from a rural agricultural background. This was followed by 20% who were children of small business folks—kirana shop owners and upwards. The rest were children with parents from the salaried class. These included 4% who were children of teachers and 2% who were children of priests. Across the board, what was the median income? It was a surprising Rs 15,000 per month between both parents. The starting salary of these entry level engineers was well above that. Anirudh’s study was more detailed and had a broader scope. When Anirudh proposed his study, I asked friends Bob Hoekstra, CEO of the Philips Innovation Centre and Rajiv Mody, founder CEO of Sasken, if we could take volunteers from their organisations as well. The two readily agreed. We looked at a little more than a hundred software engineers to determine what socio-economic strata they came from. This included the educational background of parents, whether they studied in the vernacular medium and also the economic affluence as evident from patterns of ownership. The study mapped ownership of 17 different household items from a transistor radio and a cycle at the least to a refrigerator, a washing machine and a car at the highest level. The results confirmed the broad finding of the earlier study but went one step ahead and showed that 12% of people came from not only rural but what can be called ‘poorer’ backgrounds. In this case, only one parent was a graduate or less, the respondents had studied in the vernacular medium, and/or had studied at a government institution in a small town. The ownership pattern of white goods put them right at the bottom of the quadrant—closer to the just one transistor and a bicycle cluster. Both the studies demolish the myth that information technology is an elitist industry. It is an industry that has a very high number of people who have been children of significant economic and social disadvantages but have broken free from their background and are treated at par by their employers. Not a surprise, because this is an industry that values what you know as against who you know.The National Association of Software and Service Companies (www.nasscom.org) estimates that there are seven lakh people who work in the IT sector today. What is interesting is that the sector is not new. It started way back in the late 70s, though it became big only in the 90s and, in the last five years, has been recognised as world-class. Thus, it has taken close to 30 years for it to come to the level of employing seven lakh people. Even more interesting is that in the next five years, it is about to double. By 2010, Nasscom estimates the industry will need another 1.3 million people. Given that phenomenal growth requirement, where will the future IT workers come from? Who are they? Going by both studies we conducted, a large part of the people required will be filled by our very own Buntys and Bablis as long as they have good number skills, analytical capability and a basic level of communication.For the first time in the economic history of India, their socioeconomic background will not come in their way as they seek to enter the most exciting part of their lives. However, what could hold them from getting there is the substantial information gap that exists as one goes to the district level. The child who will graduate from high school in 2006 needs to be told about the industry, the options and the entry criteria today. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html