Demographic dividend - ground view

Last week,I attended a session on cross-cultural sensitivity conducted by TEA at ISB. The speaker was a swiss guy working with a MNC in Hyderabad. His complete ppt was based on his personal experience of handling Indian, Swiss and American teams. He tried to highlight the differences between the different teams and how Indians fared when compared to others.

He talked about 7 points, which are:
1. Expectation of promotion, experience and willingness to take responsibility
2. Expectation of awards and appreciation
3. Loyalty to power
4. Asking questions
5. Knowledge sharing and intentional losses
6. Valuing certificates and
7. Customer service

And to my surprise, he rated Indians low on all the points and most of my Indian colleagues agreed to his observation. This observation raised a question which I posed immediately to him,"If Indians fare poorly on so many things while expecting so much, why then his firm chose India for it's IT R&D Center." Essentially the question in simple words is "Why India?" and for the first time I heard an expatriate saying that it is the demography that is in favor of India and more and more firms and countries are realizing that they have to work with India and China to meet their human resource needs and that Indians may not be superior in other areas as is generally perceived by Indians.

This observations raises an important question. While we can keep tapping ourselves and be happy that so much % is young and that we will more young people even after 10 years, every lost day represents lost potential. There is so much fuss going around about the low employability of Indian Engineers while not much is happening. The lost man days represent a great national loss and the more delay we make the more we are going to loose. While some of the Indians can capture higher than average compensation, as a whole India is losing out.

The loss of inaction in this case is very high and I hope to see some action both from the government and corporate sector shortly. I have been hearing this from last three years now but I am yet to see some concrete large scale action. Last week we had a panel discussion on Talent as a strategic differentiator as a part of the ISB Leadership Summit. One of the speakers, Mr. Nitin Seth, Head & Director, McKinsey & Company’s Knowledge Centre, India, talked about creating a shared service kind of facility that can improve employability skills and reduce the supply demand gap and reduce the loss of mandays due to non-availability of people.

I think it is a fantastic idea and someone takes it up seriously. It is a good paev idea but we need some serious partner. I don't know if NIIT or Team lease would be interested in such venture. I believe that corporates would be willing to buy shares initially in the project and later get candidates at a lower sourcing cost.

We had ISB day celebrations today and more about that in the next post