Outsourcing outcry dominates Indian MPs' U.S. visit
Friday, 06 June 2003, 19:30 IST
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WASHINGTON: An Indian parliamentary delegation has been urged by Congressmen and officials here not to worry too much about the outcry in the U.S. against outsourcing technology jobs to India. The delegation was told that pending legislation in six states, including New Jersey, against the shipping of jobs overseas was the result of some "misguided fears about Americans losing their jobs". They were told these legislations would never see the light of the day because trade and commerce were federal subjects. The parliamentarians told their counterparts that the U.S. should not opt for such short-sighted "protectionist policies" as those would go against U.S. interests. Members of the Indo-U.S. Parliamentary Forum, the counterpart of the U.S. Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, said this at a press conference here Thursday night at the conclusion of their three-day visit to Washington. The parliamentarians also brought to the notice of the American lawmakers a recent report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), which had quoted facts and figures to say how American companies had saved $16 billion due to outsourcing. "The trouble is many of them were not even aware of such a report," the Indian lawmakers said. It is said that thousands of technology jobs in New York and elsewhere in the U.S., ranging from data entry to software engineering, are being lost to cheaper overseas competitors. New York city's largest brokerages, banks and insurers are contracting major tech work to providers based mainly in India and China. The process, called off-shoring, saves companies up to 70 percent because the cost of work in China and India is only a fraction of what it is domestically. A recent study by management consulting firm A.T. Kearney here says financial services companies are planning to move over 500,000 jobs overseas in order to reduce operating costs by $30 billion annually. Those who addressed the press conference were: co-chair of the forum Kapil Sibal, who belongs to the Congress party, V.P.S. Badnore of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Rajiv Shukla of the Congress, Praful Patel of the Nationalist Congress Party, B.J. Panda of the Biju Janata Dal and Prithviraj Chauhan of the Congress. They interacted with representatives of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and met with several Congressmen and Senators, including Henry Hyde, Jim Leach, Patrick Kennedy and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, besides some officials at the State Department. In all their meetings, the Indian MPs impressed upon the Americans that India's foreign policy was not Pakistan-centric and that India-U.S. relations should be seen from a different angle. "This point was well taken," one of them said. Prithviraj Chauhan commended the role played by the Indian American community in forging close ties with their representatives in the U.S. Congress and suggested the setting up of a formal cell or organisation which could act as a central source of information so as to compliment the work being done by the community. Although acknowledging that there was a "sea change" in Indo-U.S. relations since their last visit here, the delegation members felt a lot more needed to be done to "market India and its policies abroad". They were appalled at the lack of knowledge or information of some basic things about India and its economic policies, especially among Congressmen. To rectify this, they felt more visits should be arranged to take the American lawmakers to India. They also wanted a "centralised cell" to be set up in India for enabling free flow of foreign direct investment from the U.S.
Source: IANS
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