There's a joke that runs like this. The CEO of a large Indian software company hops off the train at Dadar Station in Mumbai. A coolie at the station walks up to him and asks, "Sir, I work on this platform. What platform do you work on?" To my mind, that pretty much exemplifies the state of Indian software. For heaven's sake, where is the innovation in software happening anywhere on Indian soil? I mean, look at it this way. What really lies at the heart of Google? An algorithm? That's it. A powerful bloody algorithm that can come out of any place in the world!!! It didn't have to be Stanford. So how come it didn't come out of India?

I'll tell you why. It's the mindset. A few generations ago, our forefathers were happy working as clerks for the British rulers. After they left, their descendants were happy working as clerks and babus with the Indian government. And now that those jobs are disappearing, this generation is content to work on low level coding jobs for the Americans and Europeans. So much for being a software super power!!!! In much the same way that China has become the world's manufacturing sweatshop, we, in India, will turn out to be the world's services sweatshop. But there's a crucial difference. In China, the masses who work at these sweatshops, do it because they cannot do anything else. In India, I just don't get it. Perfectly qualified engineers work at call centers offering customer support in faux American accents. I just don't get it when graduates in finance work out of back offices and process papers that doesn't even need a degree.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Don't we get it? Is it so difficult to figure out that this is a commodity business? And that if tommorrow Vietnam or Phillipines for that matter offers the same services at $5 instead of the $10 we get now, companies will just move en masse there?

Sound stupid? An untenable proposition? I think not. There's a very interesting paper on the subject titled The Uneven Profile of Indian Software Exports authored by Dr Richard Heeks, a senior lecturer at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester. It doesn't make for comfortable reading.