It’s Destination India for outsourcing as high-skill jobs follow call centres

New York, April 4: Outsourcing is breaking out of the back office. For years, most service industry jobs that were moved to countries like India were considered relatively low-skill tasks like answering customer inquiries. But that has been changing in recent years, and increasingly the jobs of Western white-collar elites in fields as diverse as investment banking, aircraft engineering and pharmaceutical research have begun flowing to India and a few other developing countries.

In the view of most specialists on the phenomenon, the kinds of jobs that cannot be outsourced are slowly evaporating.

A few years ago, Airbus and Boeing were outsourcing work like digitising old hand drawings. But they have begun to rely on their Indian suppliers for even more complex work, hiring aerospace engineers from state-owned aviation companies and scholars from Indian engineering colleges. “In theory, we could place the work anywhere,” said Ian Q R Thomas, the president of Boeing India. “We’re here because we found a level of sophistication.”

Investment banks like Morgan Stanley are hiring Indians to analyse American stocks, jobs that commonly pay six-figure salaries on Wall Street.

The drug maker Eli Lilly recently handed over a molecule it discovered to an Indian company, which will be paid $500,000 to $1.5 million a year per scientist to ready the drug for commercial use — work that would be significantly more costly if carried out by Americans.

With multinationals employing tens of thousands of Indians, some are beginning to treat the country like a second headquarters, sending senior executives with global responsibilities to work there. For example, Cisco Systems, the leading maker of communications equipment, has decided that 20 per cent of its top talent should be in India within five years; it recently moved one of its highest-ranking executives, Wim Elfrink, to Bangalore, the centre of the Indian industry, as chief globalisation officer.

Accenture, the global consulting giant, has its worldwide head of business-process outsourcing in Bangalore; by December, it expects to have more employees in India than in the US.

This is not a zero-sum game, in which every job added in India comes at the expense of an American or European one. In many ways, the shift reflects a changing view at multinational companies as they find it easier to meet growing demand by taking advantage of the improved skills of newly educated people in the developing world. And some companies are returning certain jobs to the US, finding that the work in India and elsewhere is not up to snuff.

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