- Infosys, the company with a long history of delivering shoddy services, has no problem with the brightest Indians going abroad.
- The Infosys founder, instead of battling with American MNCs for “competent Indians” in order to deliver better services, is wishing them the best.
Infosys, the company with a long history of delivering shoddy services (given its poor expenditure on research), has no problem with the brightest Indians going abroad. N. R. Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys, said that these people are ‘ambassadors of India’. Now, a person like Parag Agrawal with woke credentials is certainly not a good ambassador of India, but that aside, if the founder of a company like Infosys, which should be fighting for the best talents of India, is of the view that Indians should keep going abroad and contribute to the development of other nations – this is indeed a serious problem.
“For me a small percentage of Indians going abroad, conducting themselves as model citizens of those societies that they have adopted and excelling in whatever profession they choose only enhances the brand image of India. These people are our ambassadors. So therefore I would like to applaud them rather than say they have to stay back in India. There is nothing wrong,” Murthy said in an interview.
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Most of the Indians who move to English speaking nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, are from the highly educated segments, who probably received their higher education at the premier public institutions (IITs, IIMs, IISc, NIT) with the expense being met by taxpayers’ money.
Some of them may have received even school education at publicly funded Kendriya Vidyalayas, Army Schools, etc. Given the relative poverty of India, the public institutions get a handsome share of the taxpayers’ money to manage their finances.
Companies like Infosys and TCS with large balance sheets and a lot of clout in the government, must spend money to hire the best talent from across the country and finance research and development of new technologies. However, these companies limit themselves to back-office jobs and the average salary offered by them has remained constant (around 4-5 lakh rupees per annum) for at least the last two decades.
In the last decade, Infosys bagged many big-ticket projects including 350 crore rupees MCA21, 1,380 crore rupees GSTN portal, and Income Tax portal, and all of them continue to face issues to date, and this says a lot about the amount of money the company invests in its human resources.
Infosys founder, instead of battling with American MNCs for “competent Indians” in order to deliver better services, is wishing them the best. “We have a lot of Indians. Our own youngsters have done extraordinary things. Look at the kind of startups that have come out. Therefore I would not worry too much about a few competent Indians going abroad and succeeding there. They are doing a lot of good to India, I wish them the best and I want them to do even more. They are the ambassadors of India,” Murthy said.
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Moreover, instead of investing in research at the company (given the shoddy services it delivered, one can assume how much it spends on research and human resources), Murthy is giving what Nassim Nicholas Taleb giving a cheap talk. Talking about the need to recognize and incentivize research, he said, “I do not know any nation that has improved the prosperity and well-being of its people without a good research, invention, and innovation infrastructure. Such societies have honored their intellectuals, created a climate conducive to their flourishing, and have made their lives physically comfortable. The Infosys Prize is a small attempt in this important task of our country.”
It is high time the Indian MNCs in the technology sector start investing in research and fight with American MNCs for the best talent. Moreover, they should also invest in Indian startups which are being colonized by American investors, given the lack of Rupee capital. Companies like Infosys should have been at the forefront of financing the Indian startup ecosystem, instead, their founder is wishing all the best to the “competent Indians” moving abroad.