Institute For The Future

Changing economic risk in India

Last year when I visited India for our global ethnogrpahic project, I had conversations about new economic risks with knowledge workers that almost seemed absurd in the late 1990s. Everyone was very upbeat about the state of the economy, particularly the future of the IT industry, however the fear of getting laid off was new. Salaries of most workers in the IT industry have doubled or tripled within the last 2-3 years. It is not unusual to get an annual raise of 25-40% of your salary. However, many IT workers save a good percent of their salary, even as high as 50% in case they get laid off. All of them network to have some employment options if they lose their job. "I like to keep 2-3 job offers in my pocket," told one software engineer. "I got laid off in 2002, and did not have a job for few months that changed my entire outlook." Even when I was working in India in the newspaper industry in the late 1990s, no one ever had to fear that they were going to lose their job -- it was unthinkable -- even when most journalists were not unionized. My father worked in one newspaper for most of his life, most of my friends worked for the same newspaper for atleast 15-20 year. They never looked for other options because they felt secure in their jobs. But all that is changing now. As India integrates more in the global economy, and more and more multi-national companies set up shop in India, it almost feels that Indian high-tech workers have the same worries like their counterparts here. Many fear outsourcing also as jobs that they used to do are getting outsourced to other nations that have even lower labor cost.