Indian IT Building the growth ladder of the country Date:   Tuesday , December 08, 2009 India’s key strength in continued leadership in providing resources for the IT industry comes from its large talent pool. The size, quality and scale of the Indian labor pool continue to differentiate it from all other countries. As per the year 2008 estimates, India’s total labor force stands at 523.5 million (out of a population of approximately 1.14 billion), with an unemployment rate of 7.32 percent. In the current scenario, while the cost of the labor may be facing stiff competition, the size of its labor gene pool continues to dominate. The primary focus needs to be on improving the employability quotient of the Indian labor force for sustained and continued growth in this sector. The country produces over 2.5 million university graduates every year, including 400,000 engineers and 200,000 IT professionals. The employability rate in the IT sector, however, remains constraint to only 25 percent. It is interesting to also note that one-fourth of this labor force has tertiary education (a master’s degree or greater), which provides us with the opportunity to provide higher end skills specifically if we want to dominate areas such as R&D; however, once again a similar percentage of these resources are unemployable, thus creating a similar need to improve the quality of education at the higher end of the education scale. The reverse brain drain phenomenon (back to India) of Indian nationals who have the education and work experience in other countries has accelerated during the past year, and this will help to foster a strong source of high-end expatriate talent within the country. Secondly, the focus to ensure an improvement in basic infrastructure and to ensure adequate quality of life in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities will help provide a more even distribution of population and create more opportunities for urban agglomerations. It is the creation of quality infrastructure, which will help in terms of creating large number of jobs and improving the level of employability quotient. The Indian government too stands to be a supportive pillar for the industry. The government has recognized IT as a strong engine of job creation within the country. It has made use of IT to drive improved services to citizens, as well as to improve transparency (an important part of its policy), with each action ensuring reformation of the basic amenities through IT including education. The reformation will help the IT organizations to move up the value chain and work on more and more of end-to-end solutions for their clients. This will help to foster research and development in the country. Our capability to embrace the new standards and frameworks and ensure excellence in capability is one of the strong roadmaps to become a strong country with efficient R&D capabilities. It is necessary to bring in new ideas and develop new models to improve productivity and deploy strategies to reduce costs while setting up an R&D. In addition to this, IT companies and large enterprises in India are incessantly adopting varied trends in technology that will help improve their OPEX Optimization. Enterprise Application providers are steadily adopting the on-demand / SaaS delivery model while the hardware vendors are pursuing a ‘Managed Services’ strategy. Virtualization and cloud computing has emerged as key infrastructure optimization strategies, as companies focus on consumer acquisition and retention services across verticals. Social Media is also fast becoming a key Internet technology that will dive the new face of Customer Support and Service for large enterprises dealing with Consumer Services. The author is Nick Sharma, CEO, CSS Corp