I found a couple links which preface some thoughts I have had about how the global business world is evolving. First off, it appears that one of the big (of only short term) advantages India has in the business and internet world is a huge supply is fluent English speakers… It is starting to look like the legacy of having British rule has some real advantages (if only in the near term).
China, South Korea, and most of the other expanding Pacific Rim countries are rapidly trying to expand the number of English speakers…to the degree that Americans (perennially, as a culture, showing little if any real interest in learning other languages) would find rather bewildering.
This is one of the ways in which the Indian economy can quickly bootstrap itself ever more deeply into online commerce…as well as a number of other business related venues.
Why there are so many engineers in India
http://thenextweb.com/in/2011/05/08/why-there-so-many-engineers-in-india
Evidently, a lot was going on within India, but nobody else took notice. All this would change in 1991, when economic liberalization and globalization were adopted by then Finance Minister, and current Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh. This, along with later reforms, paid huge dividends when India recorded its highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate in 2007 – of 9%. By 2009, 300 million people had been saved from extreme poverty. Thanks to globalization, in 2006, international trade would form almost a quarter of India’s GDP.
Along with globalization came the now infamous brain-drain. India’s engineers found a new impetus to get into engineering colleges in India. After graduation, they could attend some of the most prestigious universities abroad – Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford – all expenses paid, because these universities recognized the Indian engineers as hardworking, intelligent, and massively competitive. It was nothing new – Indian students had been visiting these universities since the early sixties – though the volume of Indian students going abroad shot up in the nineties. For those who didn’t want to study further, developed nations offered jobs – hundreds of thousands of them – at mind-boggling salaries, and it was literally a human capital flight to the West, especially the USA.
The hierarchy of an Indian classroom became clear – the bright kids would become engineers, the rich kids would become doctors, and the dumb kids would go into arts. Why…because it wasn’t difficult to get into arts school. It was always looked down upon if you came across someone with a B.A, even though he might be exceptionally bright and pursued arts for the love of it. The caste system, being abolished in Indian culture, had found its way into the Indian classroom in another form altogether – engineers, doctors and arts majors.
Could India turn itself into the School of the World?
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38394
Two months ago I had some serious problems with my web host which led to daily calls with the helpdesk. I soon found out that it was far better to wait until the French support center closed and therefore my call was routed to the call center in India. After their initial choc that I actually speak
English what they had apparently not thought possible as I was calling from France, I had some very pleasant and helpful conversations with the team in India although they did not have sufficient rights to fix the problems. Nevertheless all guys I spoke to where very knowledgeable and in the end one of them gave me a tip how to fix the problem myself.
Up to this point I had only heard stories of call center agents in India who hardly spoke English and who would follow the script by the line without actually being able to solve problems on their own. Based on my experience I have to dump that myth and it also made me think of the implications that could potentially have on online education.
Everyone I talked to spoke excellent English. It was clear, easy to understand and pleasant to listen to, at least for me as a European as it reminded me of old movies playing in the era of the British Empire. I would have been happy to have had such a teacher back in school, to be honest.
Now what if India would make education to one of its major exports? They have a growing number of highly qualified people who can work on the software development as well as the curriculum side. The access to a basically unlimited number of potential teachers and tutors could give Indian start-ups in education a critical competitive advantage. To only name one example here, TutorVista offers private lessons to students in the US and UK. I don’t see a reason why this should not work for other subject matters or languages.
