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Labour market developments in India’s IT
industry will continue to be influenced by the rapid changes in
international outsourcing arrangements, writes N CHANDRA MOHAN
Given the recent nature of changes in the Indian
information technology industry, observations of its labour market
have been largely based on casual empiricism. However, the availability
of large sample-based five-yearly surveys of the National Sample
Survey Organisation (NSSO) enables a deeper understanding of the
dynamics of the country’s fast-growing IT labour market. Professor
Rakesh Basant of IIM Ahmedabad and Uma Rani of the Gujarat Institute
of Development Research make an attempt in this direction.
The labour market behaviour of any particular
segment, like IT, has to be rooted in the context of structural
changes taking place within the industry. The authors argue that
a “process of deepening” is happening—although its
pace can be stepped up—against the backdrop of a transition
to the offshore model, boom in IT-enabled services, movement of
the industry towards smaller cities of metropolitan India and hiring
of workers (including more women) with diverse educational backgrounds.
Most of these changes stem from global changes
in the structure of the IT industry and the sub-contracting of IT-intensive
activities. Tracking them and tentatively suggesting hypotheses
is now possible due to the availability of NSS data for 1993-94
and 1999-2000. A word of caution is in order. Some of the observed
empirical changes in their paper ‘Labour market deepening in
the Indian information technology industry: An exploratory analysis’,
July 2004, are too sharp to be credible.
For starters, there are roughly 266,000 workers
in the IT industry and about 369,000 who were engaged in IT occupations
in 1999-2000. Among the various occupations, computing machine operators
dominate, followed by automatic data processors and system analysts
and programmers.
During the 1990s, the ranks of computing machine
operators in particular burgeoned with growth of 29 percent—partly
reflecting the explosive growth of the IT-enabled services industry.
Region-wise, the industry is concentrated in
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh,
West Bengal and Delhi. Interestingly, there is a concentration of
hardware consultancy in Maharashtra, Andhra and Tamil Nadu. Software
is dominant in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra, while data processing
is in Delhi, Karnataka and Maharashtra.
Among IT occupations, sharp shifts can be observed,
from system analysts to computing machine operators—especially
among women workers in Maharashtra and Delhi. According to the authors,
this trend reflects the fact that these two states are emerging
as important IT-enabled service hubs and that more and more women
are being employed in this segment. Among IT industry workers, the
ranks of professional workers among women have sharply fallen in
favour of clerical workers during the 1990s.
—The Financial Express
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