India’s IT industry chamber NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) believes its professionals will not be interested in working in Sri Lanka even if the sector is opened up when the proposed Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) covering services and investments is finalised later this year.
R Chandrashekhar, President of NASSCOM, said Sri Lankan IT professionals harbour a misplaced fear of being swamped by Indians should ETCA open up the sector. Instead, Sri Lankan IT firms will be challenged in hiring Indian professionals who prefer jobs in the US or Europe, he says.
Sri Lanka’s IT chamber is preoccupied with ETCA, with some of its members arguing that Indian IT professionals would swamp the market here. How is NASSCOM looking at the proposed agreement?
Frankly, we don’t talk about it much and it is not a topic of discussion. No one is saying Sri Lanka is going to be a huge opportunity and that Indian IT professionals need to go there. Indian IT professionals don’t even want to work in Sri Lanka because most of them have ambitions to work in the US or Europe. Sri Lanka’s challenge will be to attract IT professionals from India rather than being swamped by them.
Will NASSCOM welcome Sri Lankan IT professionals to India?
IT professionals, wherever they are, are not really part of a national workforce. They belong to a global workforce; that is the nature of the industry. The IT industry is driven by skills and global companies are in a dog fight over talent. According to a McKinsey report, there will be shortage of 95 million skilled professionals globally by 2020. So if you have the right skills, companies will come after you.
In IT, skills in digital, social media, the cloud, Internet of Things, analytics, mobility, machine-to-machine communication and artificial intelligence are in high demand. If Sri Lankan IT professionals have these skills, they will most surely be snapped up Indian IT firms, or for that matter even American, British or European tech firms. However, Sri Lanka is too small an economy to provide IT professionals as India requires, so we have to look elsewhere.
To what extent is NASSCOM concerned about protecting the domestic market in India?
India’s IT industry is completely global. We work in 80 countries, and 80% of revenue is exports. We don’t think local, because it is irrelevant. Planning and strategizing is global focused. The domestic market is incidental.
How big is the Indian IT industry?
It is around $150 billion in revenue terms today. In 2015, we clocked $143 billion, with exports accounting for $108 billion and e-commerce within the country at $17 billion. We expect the industry to grow at 11% per annum to $350 billion by 2025. Apart from IT services, there is huge growth in startups offering innovative new products. Indian startups raised $5 billion in 2015, up 100% from a year ago. In India, we have more than 160 venture capitalists, angel investors and private equity firms funding Indian startups, and 80-90% of them are foreign investments.
[pullquote]No one is saying Sri Lanka is going to be a huge opportunity and that Indian IT professionals need to go there[/pullquote]
What’s your favourite startup?
There are several, but what comes to mind is mobile payment gateway PayTM, a unicorn with a $1 billion valuation. It reached a customer base of more than 100 million in less than two years. They enabled secure mobile payments without bank accounts and it spread like wildfire.
What’s going to be the next big thing for India’s IT industry?
Cyber security will be a $350 billion global industry by 2025 and Indian firms will account for $35 billion of this.