Posts tagged Indian
Why Aren’t the Indian Blackouts Affecting the Country’s Technology Centers?
Aug 1st
Two days of widespread blackouts in India have many outside observers wondering if India and it’s tech-support call centers can meet the pace of its own growth within the Information Age. But it turns out India has a very 20th Century solution to keep service going for consumers around the world.
On Monday, the power grid in the northern India states went down, affecting an estimated 400-500 million Indians. Then, as if things couldn’t get any worse for the country, the eastern power grid crashed as well, plunging another 100-150 million people into darkness.
Its not entirely clear how many people are actually affected by the lack of power. Wilson Center analyst Michael Kugelman said on Marketplace this morning, “It’s true the country has more than a billion people but you got 400 million people in the country that are not on the grid that use traditional energy sources: firewood.”
If the numbers affected aren’t clear, neither is the effect the blackouts are having on India’s emerging technology centers. One would expect the situation is not good, since no power means no calls coming in or out to the nations’ many outsourced call centers and IT shops.
It’s a Diesel Thing
But India has plenty of experience getting things done, even in adverse conditions. Blackouts were already common in the Asian sub-continent, common enough that most businesses whose livelihoods depend on electricity typically have a backup plan in place.
In most cases, that means privately owned diesel generators. A 2010 report, for example, estimated that the country consumes 2.2 billion liters of diesel just to keep its cell towers running. So far at least, that backup diesel power seems to be keeping business in the technology and call center companies up and running.
“Delhi Metro operations were… affected largely. The major shifts affected were the early morning shifts,” Keshav R. Murugesh, WNS Group CEO, told FoxNews.com. WNS runs call centers for T-Mobile, Virgin Atlantic and the STAR Alliance of airlines. The company was able to keep its call centers online with backup power and by shifting calls to centers that still had power.
Much of the power is slowly coming back online. And in the short term, the diesel generators are keeping critical functions operating. But that’s hardly a long-term solution, and many in the country remain frustrated wondering how long India can maintain rapid growth with an infrastructure that’s so notoriously fallible.
Larger Frustrations
“What they’re really angry about is that just a couple of months ago the price of power was increased by 24%, so they’re saying that they’re paying much more for power and these outages are occurring and paralyzing the city; and making it difficult for us to go to work and for our children to go to school,” Dr. Mitra Chenoy, professor of politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Marketplace.
The problem of insufficient infrastructure isn’t necessarily an Indian one alone. It affects many nations striving to be a center of technology and commerce in the 21st Century. But its bringing home the realization that India still have a ways to go before it can meet the demands of its new growth.
In the meantime, though, all those diesel generators mean you can still get tech support 24-hours-a-day. At least for now.
Mumbai, India photo by Simone D. McCourtie / World Bank.
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Indian SEO Company, Profit By Search Announces Conversion Improvement Services – PR Web (press release)
May 16th
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Indian SEO Company, Profit By Search Announces Conversion Improvement Services
PR Web (press release) Every website has its own unique concept related to the products and services offered along with all the features and characteristics. Profit By Search is an expert in improving website conversion statistics. Every website has its own unique concept … |
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Indian SEO Company, Profit By Search Announces Google, Bing, Yahoo Local … – PR Web (press release)
May 9th
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Indian SEO Company, Profit By Search Announces Google, Bing, Yahoo Local …
PR Web (press release) Creating an effective online SEO campaign is going to take time and energy, but it is necessary for any company that would like to expand their business, attract new customers, and keep up with the competition. Leading Search Engines – most notably … |
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Indian Trial Court to Proceed with Google-Facebook Censorship Case
May 3rd
In a criminal complaint filed in India earlier this year, journalist Vinay Rai alleged that Facebook, YouTube, and the Orkut social network are hosting content that “seeks to create enmity, hatred and communal violence” and “will corrupt minds.” In response to the criminal complaint, Google and Facebook promptly filed a petition to stop the criminal [...]
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Indian companies giving top priority to SEO India marketing – IndiaCompanyNews (press release)
Sep 7th
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Indian companies giving top priority to SEO India marketing
IndiaCompanyNews (press release) Hence, it's not astonishing that the Indian companies are giving top priority to the SEO form of marketing. Majority of Indian companies, in a bid to market them more aggressively, are opting for the SEO India marketing campaign. … Kirk Communications: an SEO Company That Helps Businesses Understand Online … Steps toward Success for Your Online Business with an SEO Company |
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Sahul India Join Hands With Indian Seo Company for Their Online Marketing Services – SBWire (press release)
Aug 28th
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Sahul India Join Hands With Indian Seo Company for Their Online Marketing Services
SBWire (press release) Sahul India Limited, a renowned ayurvedic manufacturer in India has chosen Indian SEO Company (an internet marketing venture of Websys India) to facilitate their SEO services. Kolkata, West Bengal — (SBWIRE) — 08/28/2011 — Indian SEO Company (an … |
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Indian Government to Launch Education Social Network
Aug 8th
Can a government build an effective Facebook for education?
The government of Rajasthan, one of the largest states in India, is building out extensive infrastructure for Information and Communication Technology resources and training, with the collaboration of multiple international agencies including the World Economic Forum.
Next month, the state’s information technology department plans on launching its own education social network: like Facebook, for learning. According to coverage in The Economic Times of India and elsewhere, the site will include all the standard features of social networking (photos, games) but will be focused primarily on educational collaboration and will include topic experts jumping in to answer questions raised by users.
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65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet, says Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the HASTAC/John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition.
From Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Editorial this weekend, Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade
The Indian tech economy has a long history of leadership in e-learning and so building an official social network to augment other educational efforts sounds like a smart next step to explore. Many have tried before, let’s see what the government can do. Given the massive adoption of mobile devices in India (second most data consumption in the world), it will be interesting to see what kind of mobile component the effort will have.
Can a state-built social network prove compelling to young users? That will probably be easier said than done, but it sounds like there are enough resources behind the project to expect meaningful investment in research and design. The responsible department’s own website doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, though.
Pluggd.in, a leading blog about technology startups in India, calls both the country’s school management software and its education system in general “archaic.”
The urban/rural digital divide in India is severe but efforts to change that are underway. (The national literacy rate is 63% and only 3% of homes own personal computers.) Yahoo India, for example, announced a nation-wide program in June to educate rural young people about how to use email, search and other parts of the internet. Another government program was launched in 2009 and used downloadable educational materials to increase literacy among women.
In April, the Indian national government passed a law recognizing the United Nations declaration that education is a universal human right. Only Belgium and Holland have joined India in doing so. Unfortunately, the Indian government is also apt to pass laws permitting censorship of online communications.
There’s a legacy of struggle to capture the benefits of the internet for educational purposes in India, just as there is everywhere. Ten years ago, Pramod Khera wrote the following in a column in India Today (via educator Stephen Downes):
“E-learning today is facing the same dilemma and acceptance problems that other Net applications are encountering. The Net has grown at an incredible speed in the past decade mainly because of unreasonably high expectations created by Internet and dotcom enthusiasts and protagonists. In their eagerness, they created applications without really analysing and understanding the fundamentals of these applications. They did a good job of populating the Web with enormous content and faulty applications. As a result, customers experienced serious shortcomings, lacunae and inefficiencies in their (applications’) delivery. The story of e-learning is no different.”
Those same words could have been written about online education anywhere, ten years ago, if not today. It will be very interesting to see what the government of Rajasthan launches next month.
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What’s It Like to Work in an Indian Call Center?
Jul 7th
We’ve questioned before the value of investing in contact center technology without improving call center conditions, and the ability of outsourced labor (regardless of whether it is also off-shored) to provide good customer service. These are the types of questions that are important for business decision makers to ask. If you want to go a bit further, you can read this story in Mother Jones about the experience of a writer from the U.S. training to work in a center in India. It doesn’t provide much detail as to whether you should or shouldn’t outsource your customer service functions (or to who), but it doesn’t provide an interesting perspective on the conditions of these workplaces.
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Much of the article revolves around the cultural impact that the business process outsourcing industry has brought to India, both good (more economic opportunities for women) and bad (the potential stifling of Indian culture as call center workers attempt to conceal their identities). Here are a few interesting points:
- There are almost as many women as men working in the call centers.
- Many of these workers are college educated, but are doing very basic work.
- Some workers are encouraged to eat American fast food and listen to American music, even on the weekends.
But what I find most interesting about the article are the details about day to day life in the call centers. The writer, Andrew Marantz, didn’t actually get to complete his training due to visa issues, but while he was able to learn about how the call centers work:
This reminded her of another rule: “No leaving the premises during work. You can smoke out front, but don’t leave the gates.”
On our next smoke break, I asked Mr. Long Island City if he found this rule strange. “No, it’s just for safety types,” he said. “Especially for the girls. Who knows what could happen to a girl on her own?” Another classmate had his own theory. “Out there it’s India, man,” he said, gesturing through the gate to where a goat was urinating in the street. “We go outside, and when we go back in, we bring India in with us.”
Marantz was also also able to collect anecdotes from trainees who had previously worked elsewhere. Some workers also told Marantz about their experiences in phishing schemes: “They tell their information over the phone and you don’t even write it, you just write the credit card. We take our commission. Next week, the company disconnects the phone.”
What’s most striking, though not surprising, is how much anger is directed at the Indian call center workers by the customers they are serving.
Given how much work goes into training the workers to suppress accents and use popular phrases from television, I wonder how often I’ve talked to someone in a call center in an offshore call center and not even realized it.
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