Comment by Riaz Haq on June 13, 2017 at 7:16am

India's Tech Firms Face Fundamental Shift From IT To More Advanced Tech

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/06/13/530876721/...

Madeshwaran Subramani is the human face of IT disruption in India. He recalls being recently summoned to the HR office of his employer in southern city of Coimbatore at 11 a.m. By noon, the 29-year-old software engineer was out of a job. He worked for Cognizant Technology, a U.S.-based firm with offices in India.

"They give only two options," explained Subramani: Leave immediately and take four months' pay, or stick around another 60 days and leave with two months' salary. Subramani, who has a mortgage and a child, says he was given one hour to choose. He'd been with Cognizant since graduating from college.

"Nearly eight years' experience [as an] associate," Subramani says wistfully. "Within one hour everything is over."

He walked out and, days later, was ferrying customers in his car, which he turned into a taxi.

India is capping unprecedented success and expansion in its IT sector with something equally unprecedented: layoffs.

For decades India's IT talent has maintained the world's computers, databases and back offices. But new technologies are overtaking that old business model, and India's tech giants are scrambling to keep pace.

For 20 years, the nation's lucrative business model revolved around the idea that you can move work to low-cost locations, such as India.

But cheap outsourced labor that performs routine tasks is being eclipsed, says Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of the Dallas-based research consulting firm Everest Group. He says the demand now is for disruptive technologies, "like artificial intelligence, cloud [computing], big data analytics, ... robotic process automation."

These technologies require highly advanced skills, and to be competitive, India's IT firms will have to either replace or reskill their workers.

But, Bendor-Samuel says, "a significant proportion, perhaps as much as half, will struggle with their training."

Bendor-Samuel says 20,000 employees in India's 4-million-strong IT sector lost their jobs this year, and he predicts that will accelerate to hundreds of thousands of layoffs over the next few years.

"These companies don't only face the issue of retraining people, they face a fundamentally different change in their business model — how they make money — and it's going to cause them a lot of pain," he says.

India's tech industry isn't the only one affected, says Phil Fersht, CEO of the research and analysis firm HfS in Cambridge, England.

"This is a global problem where there's less need for routine transactional employees, he says. "And unfortunately for India their IT industry is caught up in this inflection point and this [long-term] shift."

But R. Chandrashekhar, president of India's National Association of Software and Services Companies, says it's not as if all the jobs that were previously there "have suddenly gone out of fashion."

"That's certainly not the case. These are shifts that are taking place and they are taking place incrementally," Chandrashekhar says. Tech firms are "aggressively" retraining staff, he says.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2017 at 4:07pm

#Indian #Technology Workers Worry About a Job Threat: Technology. #H1B #ModiInUS

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/25/business/india-outsourcing-layof...

PUNE, India — Last month, Sudhakar Choudhari took the company bus as usual from his one-bedroom apartment to the suburban offices of Tech Mahindra, a major employer of workers in India that powers the global technology machine behind the scenes. Then a manager took him into a conference room and asked him to resign.

“It was a terrible scene for me,” said Mr. Choudhari, 41, who had been with the company for 11 years and most recently maintained software for a British client. As the manager spoke, he thought: “I have an 11-year-old child. My wife is not working. How to pay the home loans?”

Mr. Choudhari is one of a number of Indian technology workers who have lost their jobs in recent months as many in India debate whether an industry that has long served as a gateway to the middle class is preparing to shed jobs en masse.

India’s information technology industry grew at a breakneck speed over the past two decades thanks to the trend commonly called offshoring. The industry and related businesses generate more than $150 billion in annual revenue and employ about four million people to build and test software, to enter and analyze data, and to provide customer support for American and European companies looking for relatively inexpensive labor.

But the global tech industry is increasingly relying on automation, robotics, big data analytics, machine learning and consulting — technologies that threaten to bypass and even replace Indian workers. For example, automated processes may soon replace the kind of work Mr. Choudhari was performing for foreign clients, which involved maintaining software by occasionally plugging in simple code and analyzing data.

“What we’re seeing is an acceleration in shedding for jobs in India and an adding of jobs onshore,” said Sandra Notardonato, an analyst and research vice president for Gartner, a research and advisory company. “Even if these companies don’t have huge net losses, there’s a person who will suffer, and that’s a person with a limited skill set in India.”

Such job losses could be politically damaging to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who won an electoral mandate in 2014 on the promise of development and employment for a bulging youth population. In January, near the three-year mark of his administration, an economic survey reported that job creation had stalled.

So far, the scale of the impact is not clear. T. V. Mohandas Pai, a longtime industry figure, estimates the cuts will encompass up to 2 percent of the work force by September, mainly from culling underperformers. A 2015 study released by the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the Indian technology industry trade group known as Nasscom, and McKinsey India found that 50 to 70 percent of workers’ skills would be irrelevant by 2020.

Of course, new technologies will create new jobs. The impact of automation and artificial intelligence still is not clear, and they could open up new areas that simply shift tech work rather than eliminate it.

But some in the Indian tech industry worry that many of the new jobs will be created outside India, in places like the United States, in part because President Trump has pledged to tighten visa laws that allowed many Indian nationals to go to that country to work. The subject is likely to pop up on Monday, when Mr. Modi is scheduled to visit the White House.

The Indian government has rushed to reassure the public that job losses will be minimal. Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Indian minister who oversees the technology industry, recently denied that major layoffs were occurring even as he encouraged the industry to speed up development. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 7, 2017 at 7:25am

#Pakistan rupee rebounds to Rs 105.8 to US$ after shock plunge to 108 

https://www.ft.com/content/79895921-f381-37b3-ab3c-d814a943ff01

Pakistani rupee rebounds after shock plunge fastFT Read next fastFT Dollar takes a dip on US payrolls report 2 HOURS AGO Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save 2 HOURS AGO by: Mehreen Khan Pakistani’s rupee has recovered some poise after a shock plunge against the dollar that has escalated tensions between the government and central bank. The rupee nosedived more than 3 per cent on Tuesday to its lowest since at least 1989 – marking its first significant move in over two years. The central bank had been keeping the currency stable against the dollar for over three years with the surprise plunge immediately raising questions about the State Bank of Pakistan allowing the depreciation to help support the economy. Having weakened from Rs104.8 against the dollar to Rs108, the rupee is now trading around Rs105.8 but has still not managed to wipe out the week’s losses. Pakistan’s finance minister has since hit out at the central bank, accusing it of “exploiting” the country’s political troubles where prime minister Nawaz Sharif has been implicated in a corruption scandal over the Panama Papers. Ishaq Dar, finance minister, called the move in the currency “artificial”, and said he had “deep concern and indignation” at the central bank’s tactics. He has ordered a government investigation into the FX move. Pakistan has suffered from a drop in exports in recent years, as well as declining remittances from Pakistanis living overseas. Economists note that a weaker currency should help reverse both trends while also allowing the central bank to preserve its dwindling foreign currency reserves. The benchmark Karachi 100 stock exchange is up 1 per cent today after suffering a 4 per cent plunge on Tuesday.  

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