Wired News reports on the Jobs Squeeze for Indian Workers:
U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft are already exploring countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, says a report from research firm IDC. The new destinations include Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Back in 1990, when I helped some members of an Indian religious cult set up a software company in South India, I predicted this would happen, just as it has in the Little Dragons and in Malaysia. A developing country can only attract business on the basis of cheap labor for so long until it’s choked on its own success and the cheap labor market moves elsewhere. Indians still have an advantage over other Asian countries because of widespread English usage among the educated class, but Indian culture is basically anti-capitalist and anti-Western, so they won’t be able to compete with New Europe for long unless they can deal with their BJP problem and the arrogance of their Brahmin caste.
Actually, to hear Shanti tell it, the biggest problem in India is that if you’re perceived to be one of the classic “Upper Castes,” you are now considered an oppressor and suspect from day one. Furthermore, there are aggressive quota systems in place in universities and many government-controlled jobs to assure that the right percentages of each “caste” are represented.
Which is why a lot of smart Indians are getting out of the country.
She really surprised me with that, but it doesn’t surprise me a bit.
In some South Indian communities, Brahmins are a bit inbred, which you can see from birth defects and various sorts of physical deformity. Emigration is a key to rejuvenating these lines, because it draws from a wider deeper breeding pool than theses insular communities can support.
Much of the carping about the preferences for what they call “The Scheduled Castes” simply reflects a sense of entitlement that’s characteristic of the high-born, as your better Indian universities, such as IIT, are merit-based and not quota-driven. I don’t see that it follows that caste should dictate who gets educated and who doesn’t in a democratic country.
The caste system’s closest parallel in America is the slave south, and we know the lengths slaveholders went to in order to justify that social system.