The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution by Dinesh C. Sharma

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution by Dinesh C. Sharma Salem Elzway (bio) Dinesh C. Sharma, The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution, The MIT Press, 2015. Histories of computing and IT have predominantly been transatlantic stories of origins and triumphs. Accordingly, computing historiography has rarely escaped its Anglo-American confines. More recently, texts such as Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011) and Benjamin Peters's How Not To Network a Nation (2016) have broadened our field's geographical scope by redrawing these borders and narratives. In this vein, Dinesh C. Sharma's The Outsourcer: The Story of India's IT Revolution brings the world's largest democracy into our field by providing the most comprehensive coverage yet produced of the Indian IT industry. After independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, Indian political, industrial, and scientific elites determined that building industrial capacity through targeted import substitution could create national self-sufficiency and, in part, solve the post-colonial "poverty trap." This required the cultivation of indigenous educational institutions for scientific and technological development, and the Indian government deemed IT a crucial sector (pp. 1–7). Indian state policy for IT development emanated from a diffuse network of academicians, businessmen, engineers, politicians, and scientists whose work centered on national programs of atomic, space, and defense research. Many of these professionals had personal and institutional links to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, ensuring that scientific and technological experts would play a decisive role in policy making (pp. 35–36). Sharma shows that the Indian IT industry emerged from the convergence of the country's defense needs, Cold War capitalism, and the demand for more scientific equipment. Due to India's colonial history, the country's scientific and technological resources were limited during the early Cold War, and the government's IT enthusiasts were forced by the state to turn to both the Soviet Union and the United States in search of the necessary capital, technology, and expertise (such as Norbert Weiner, who seemed to be everywhere during this period). For example, in an attempt to recreate the successes of the US military-industrial-academic complex, nine US universities helped establish the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, which Sharma calls the first "Indian MIT" (pp. 10–38). While state-to-state relations between the Indian government and the Cold War superpowers were productive, the economic and political relationships with private sector firms were initially less cordial. Sharma details how this was particularly the case with IBM. Opening its first Indian office in 1951, IBM would come to dominate the commercial market into the early 1970s. From marketing outdated systems to manipulating pricing quotes, IBM's unfair practices and outright fraud exploited, and profiteered from, the massive state resources funneled into the growing indigenous IT industry. By the mid-1970s, the Indian government, weary of the costs to both its treasury and the technological development of the country, adjusted its legal policy to rein in IBM's behavior. This motivated IBM to leave the country in 1978, only to return two years later as the political and social winds of India shifted toward neoliberalism and Indian computer professionals began forging important connections with the multinational corporations pioneering the IT revolution in the West (pp. 55–75). During this period, India pioneered the practices of "bodyshopping" (contracting Indian IT workers to foreign clients for work to be done abroad) and its better-known complement "outsourcing" (bringing software work for foreign clients into the country). At the same time, private hardware and software firms grew their competencies through massive banking automation, train reservation, and rural telephony projects, all initiated and funded by the Indian government. The combination of continued government support of software development and export, the establishment of the Internet in 1989 and its commercial introduction in 1995, and the ongoing education of more and more highly trained, but poorly paid Indian IT workers secured India's place in the global IT market (pp. 77–103, 131–184). Within a generation of IBM's two-year "vacation" from the Indian market, the country had transformed from the world's largest nonaligned socialist nation to the world...