IT industry chamber SLASSCOM (Sri Lanka Association of Software and Services Companies) is welcoming a proposed services and investment liberalizing deal with India, but recommends a cap on the number of professionals allowed to work here at one time and advises that their contracts with private companies not be for longer than three years.
Sri Lanka and India are negotiating an Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) to liberalize services and investments. Initially, the agreement will allow Indian IT professionals and skilled ship builders to work here. The proposed deal is drawing flak from nationalists and protectionist industrialists, professionals, and trade unions.
India’s over $100 billion in IT exports is more than 100 times Sri Lanka’s, creating employment for over 3.5 million people, many of whom have experience as suppliers for some of the largest global companies. Successful Indian firms include product specialists like Infosys; and unicorns such as Uber rival Ola Cabs, and e-commerce companies Snapdeal and Flipkart. Indian IT startups raised more than $5 billion in new funding in 2015 according to India’s IT industry chamber NASSCOM, more than five times as much as Sri Lanka’s total foreign direct investments during the first nine months that year.
Jayantha De Silva, President and Chief Executive of global ERP company IFS’s Sri Lankan unit, and Chairman Emeritus of SLASSCOM, says opening the industry to highly skilled IT professionals from India will help build capacity, but controls are needed to give the industry here space to grow. Excerpts from his conversation with Echelon are as follows:
What is SLASSCOM’s official stance on the inclusion of IT in the proposed Indo-Lanka ETCA?
Conceptually, SLASSCOM is not against the inclusion of IT in ETCA. There is a shortage of highly skilled professionals in a range of IT-related disciplines. For example, if we look at the software development cycle, first comes the idea, and then the conceptual design phase that Sri Lankans are good at. From this point we are not so great. We lack capacity, especially in research, technical design, development and distribution.
There are many opportunities in the world Sri Lankan IT professionals can tap into, but we are missing out on a lot more besides. We don’t have the experience and skills to take on large infrastructure projects in the areas of defense, medicine, city planning and aviation technology to name a few simply because we haven’t been exposed to them. We need to scale up. We need to access international expertise so that we can develop our own capabilities.
The professional skills that we need can be accessed from anywhere, and India is one opportunity. They are recognized as a leader in the global IT game – just look at the global IT companies India has established over the years. The concept of IT in ETCA is not something we should worry about as long as there is transparency and the government incorporates SLASSCOM’s proposals.
What are these proposals?
SLASSCOM requested that the government include three conditions into the agreement. The first is to cap salaries, so only highly skilled IT professionals from India can be hired to work here. Second, we suggested contracts be limited to a specific period. Last, we asked the government to set limits on the number of visas issued to IT professionals each year. All this will help keep entry and low-level jobs free for Sri Lankans.
Surely, IT professionals from India, or anywhere else for that matter, can be hired with or without ETCA?
Yes, but it is a time-consuming process. ETCA will make it a lot easier and create a formal channel with rules and regulations for companies here to hire professionals from India. Even with ETCA, finding highly skilled IT professionals willing to work in Sri Lanka is not going to be easy. For one thing, they will leave jobs in India to work here only for higher pay.
Corrected Indian IT exports value