I read the article except for this part, there isn’t much to disagree with the article. India’s workforce is huge. Even with 40% turnover rate, BPO will not run out of people willing to work. The only troubling thing is salary growth has been faster than anticipated, due to poor quality of workforce and those with right skills being highly in demand.

Wake me up when BPOs actually have trouble recruiting ppl, which is not the case.

You mean private schools ? Private schools in India are normally called Public Schools.

Yes, BPO training is being offered in government schools or what used to be called in chennai as ‘st.cobbs’ – short form for Madras Corporation schools.

latin is definitely a private school affair

Latin was taught by Christian missionaries as it was the language of the Church. Every altarboy needed to learn Latin. Further, if you had any desire to participate in church prayers one had to learn Latin. So many men and women learnt Latin. Latin was not private school in the sense of Doon / Bombay Scottish. Now, I dont think anyone learns Latin – I could be wrong.

The difference between the wealthy, modern sections of an Indian metropolis and an Indian village or small town are more appearant than between those sections of the Indian metropolis and an American small town. It’s always a major cultural shock for me to take the bus from our village to New Delhi and back than it is to fly from NY to New Delhi and back.

Vic–thanks–interesting. Do you happen to know if this legislation applies to “legal persons” (i.e., corporations), or just natural ones?

When interest in the poor nations of the world really began to materialize following the Second World War, economists in the industrialized nations were caught off guard. They had no readily available conceptual apparatus with which to analyze the process of economic growth in largely agrarian societies characterized by the virtual absence of modern economic structures. But they did have the recent experience of the Marshall Plan, under which massive amounts of U.S. financial and technical assistance enabled the war-torn countries of Europe to rebuild and modernize their economies in a matter of a few years. Moreover, was it not true that all modern industrial nations were once undeveloped agrarian societies? Surely their historical experience in transforming their economies from poor agricultural subsistence societies to modern industrial giants had important lessons for the “backward” countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The logic and simplicity of these two strands of thought–the utility of massive injections of capital and the historical pattern of the now developed countries–was too irresistible to be refuted by scholars, politicians, and administrators in rich countries to whom people and ways of life in the developing world were often no more real than U.N. statistics or scattered chapters in anthropology books. Because of its emphasis on the central role of accelerated capital, this approach is often dubbed “capital fundamentalism.”

Then they cover Rostow’s stages of growth, Harrod-Domar (or Harold-Kumar as I called it) and then this biting bit:

Unfortunately, the mechanisms of development embodied in the theory of stages of growth did not always work. And the basic reason they didn’t work was not because more saving and investment isn’t a necessary condition for accelerated rates of economic growth–it is–but rather because it is not a sufficient condition. The Marshall Plan worked for Europe because the European countries receiving aid possessed the necessary structural, institutional, and attitudinal conditions (e.g., well-integrated commodity and money markets, highly developed transport facilities, a well-trained and educated workforce, the motivation to succeed, an efficient government bureaucracy) to convert new capital effectively into higher levels of output. The Rostow and Harrod-Domar models implicitly assume the existence of these same attitudes and arrangements in underdeveloped nations. Yet in many cases they are lacking, as are complimentary factors such as managerial competence, skilled labor, and the ability to plan and administer a wide assortment of development projects. But at an even more fundamental level, the stages theory failed to take into account the crucial fact that contemporary developing nations are part of a highly integrated and complex international system in which even the best and most intelligent development strategies can be nullified by external forces beyond the countries’ control.

throw in the sectoral constraints that have been mentioned above and the linear stages theory becomes less of a staple and more of a solitary piece in an eclectic puzzle that informs us on development issues.

nah. its just that I am not sure how you have the energy to post such insightfull comments on diverse topics. I apparently have a degree in economics, and I just dont have the energy to say anything as insightfull as the stuff you casually drop….

Large farms in India are limited by legistlation in most states in India. There is a ceiling on how much land an individual can own. The impetus for that was to eliminate the large feudal landlords….something that Pakistan still has. Large farms do not produce better yields, and 60% of India is still engaged in agragarian occupation. They may have less costs, but then you have issue of landless labor. If there is no reform in that sector, the core of Indian nationhood could start to rot.

yes, but the growth in india is not ground-up, but restricted to the middle class. if anything, it is increasing the income disparity in that consumer goods and services (restaurants, movie theaters, sodas, whatever) have in fact been priced up to account for the increased buying power of this newly rich middle class, and is pushing them out of the range of the still poor majority. unless manufacturing takes off (and there are some efforts towards this, although i haven’t seen too much uptake yet), there is a serious risk of this economic growth posing class conflict, not a trickle-down utopia.

you make me wish i was less vapid…. Why, Puli? [not saying you're vapid, just not gathering the underlying intent]

awwww… puli likes camille but c’mon man, stop being such a beta!