India - Sooper Power with a Power cut?

Sometimes only when things do not go your way do you realize that things can be done maybe differently. I think soon some "India" as a nation will realize this. India although being always termed as the "IT super power" has no product of its own to speak of. Yes, we as a country have done a lot when it comes to IT processes and have been able to meet the customer expectations with respect to the coveted time, quality & cost paradigm. If we take a step back and look, most of the work that we get is from the western countries who are really making products be it in the field of IT or otherwise. India has always been looked upon more like a LCC or when expanded "Low Cost Country", rather than someone who has the technical expertise to do something in the best way. In fact many of the more popular software development methodologies which IT engineers swear by like the SCRUM or the Agile should have been invented by India, if all the talk about the superpower were to be true. 

As I dig deeper, it gets dirtier. With a ranking of 46 based on study conducted by Business Software alliance in terms of competitiveness, we are clearly off margin by a fair amount. One shouldn't feel undermined if someone says that one engineer from country X is equal to how many engineers in India. Quite naturally, the term "Full Time Equivalent" is coined because the number of Indian engineers to equate to that from country X is greater than 1. 

While i do not discount the fact that in many cases Indian engineers are far more capable than their western counterparts, but when we look at it statistically the numbers might not be really pleasing. If i just look outside my domain of engineering and concentrate on other aspects like business things take a turn for worse. We have some of the richest people in the world, take Mr. Ambani for example, but we have some of the worst run businesses too. Corruption and business are almost synonymous. The word "Honest businessman" or "Honest politician" are used often as oxymoron in the Indian context. 

I have more to say...but then i have less of what we call "Free time"...so the rest has to wait for the next post...