Can India’s high growth continue? No. Last year India produced goods and services worth $1.2 trillion. This is around Rs50,000 per Indian. Of this, 54% came from services, 29% from industry and 17% from agriculture. Services include trade, transportation, hospitality, mobile telephony, and software and outsourcing. Industry means things such as manufacturing, mining and energy.
Of every 100 Indians, 60 depend on agriculture. The Indian farmer is unproductive. We are self-sufficient in agriculture, but what this means is that 60% of the population feeds 100%. So each farmer grows food for himself and less than one other person. America is also self-sufficient, but farming families are only 1.3% of population. To sustain growth, half a billion Indians will need to do something other than agriculture. But what?
Lesson 1: Primary school doesn’t teach us how to process information sequentially. Rajkumar / Mint
China dominates industry, and India is a star in services.
Seventy per cent of India’s growth comes from services. Ten years ago, Wipro’s turnover was $150 million. Today it is $5 billion, TCS is $6 billion and Infosys is $4.5 billion. Software and outsourcing is only 7% of India’s GDP, but contributes 2% of overall growth. Soon this will become 3%. The IT-BPO sector is great: not polluting, not much bribing needed, and, because it’s urban, each job creates three indirect jobs.
One strategy to sustain 8% growth is to make the sector big enough, fast enough so it cancels out the unproductive parts of our economy.
But that isn’t going to happen.
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Wipro employs 95,000, Infosys 105,000 and TCS 143,000. Of the Fortune 500, only Wal-Mart in America adds more people annually than either Infosys or TCS.
Last year Infosys hired 28,231 people, including 18,000 graduates paid Rs3 lakh a year. This year they will hire 20,000 at Rs3.25 lakh. Infosys is hiring though there isn’t enough business. We know this because 30,000 people at Infosys are “benched”. So why are they still hiring? And why raise salaries?
Because they cannot find competent people.
Infosys spends twice as much as its American competitors on training: 4% of revenue.
Nasscom says software firms reject 90% of college graduates and 75% of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained. This year Infosys increased its training of employees to 29 weeks. That’s seven months of training. Why do they need so much training? And why is the quality of applicants so poor?
Because the educated Indian is only half-literate.
Nine half-literates are produced by our colleges, by Nasscom’s numbers, for every graduate of passable quality. What is Nasscom’s solution to this? It wants government to boost college enrolment from 10% of those in secondary school, to 25%. Nasscom knows this will only increase the number of job applicants, not the quality, but there’s no other solution.