Ask the question: Are British workers becoming too lazy to compete with India s booming economy? And, the answer is: Yes! according to Peter Luff, Chairman of the House of Commons Trade and Industry Committee, just back from a fact-finding tour of India with members of his team. At a meeting of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Birmingham, Luff, a Conservative Member of Parliament from mid-Worcestershire, warns it is time for a wake-up call instead of taking the country s prosperity for granted. Pointing out that there were more Indian companies in Great Britain than British firms in India, Luff said Indian owners and executives increasingly expressed dismay at the disappearance of work ethic among British workers.
I know many British people are working harder than ever, but it s not universally true. What, we heard from Indian companies time and time again was complaints about the British work ethic, he said. They ring the UK at 5:00 p.m. to sort out a client s problems, which is 10.30 p.m. in India, and the people here say: We are sorry but we are going home. They just don t understand it. He went on to say the lack of enterprise in the country was enormously worrying, even more so, as British firms continued to invest in USA and Europe, and not in Brazil, China, Russia or India. Making safe investments in the economies of the past, instead, they should be aware that it was the economies of the future which should be invested in. In short, Luff having seen the writing on the wall is exhorting the British to invest heavily in India, a country touted to be a powerful, if not the most powerful economy of the 21st century.
Telling his audience that India s economy was growing at 8% and more a year, Luff told them the growth had less or nothing to do with British jobs being moved to India. As proof of his statement, he noted out of a population of 1.2-billion, only 130,000 of them worked in call centres, and those that did, did so for American companies.
Luff went on to add, the real boom in India was in jobs among professionals, such as software engineers, which has led to India s middle class today to emerge as large as the entire 295-million population of USA, and to grow by 25-million a year.
A huge domestic market is opening up, the Indian railways, already the second largest employer in the world, recently advertised for 48,000 vacancies. They got seven million applications, he was quoted as saying.
And, the next bit of news from the sea-bound isle of Great Britain will, no doubt, cause Luff to grow livid. In a unique twist to off-shoring / outsourcing from Britain to India, British university students have been paying computer professionals in India to complete course assignments, but of course, for a fee. British academics tracking such malpractices have dubbed the newly recognised trend that operates mainly through the Internet as contract plagiarism . A trend more in vogue amongst students enrolled in IT-courses at British universities. Following a simple modus operandi, students put an offer on websites with details of their requirements, inviting bids from professionals willing to complete the assignment for a fee. Highly competitive, the online bidding invariably dominated by IT professionals from India allows British students to get their computer assignments done for as little as five to ten British Pounds, all high quality and tight deadlines met.
According to an investigation conducted by Robert Clarke and Thomas Lancaster of the University of Central England (UCE), the trend has assumed the dimensions of international trade, with offers made by students in western countries, and competitively bid for by professionals in India and Eastern Europe. It s a little cottage industry, according to Clarke, a lecturer in the department of computing at the UCE.
Monitoring a legitimate website on which small companies advertise for software to be written, Clarke and Lancaster instead found 12% of its business was students asking for bids to write their assignments. Offers are mostly from students wanting, for example, a computer code written, students either incapable, lazy or wealthy enough to pay someone else to do the needful.
Over the course of a year, the UCE lecturers found the average student on the site posted four to seven assignments to be done by someone else. This could only mean they were repeat offenders, who had apparently gotten good results from previous such purchases, and had gotten away with the scam. Also, discovered was the presence of subcontractors offering 50-100 assignments (and, in one case more than 200) for bids, who acted as middlemen between cheating students and code writers.
Tipped off about the Rent-a-coder website when one of his assignments appeared on it, Clarke tracked down the student concerned. Along with Lancaster, he has been able to identify 48-students from different universities across Britain trying to cheat by contracting out their assignments. Other cheating students were traced to countries including the USA, Canada and Australia.
And so, Luff has a point there, when he rails against those British taking the country s prosperity for granted. For, of course, isn t complacency the first sign of an imminent downfall! It happened to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mughals, the British, and the signs are all there in USA, Canada, UK, in fact make a clean sweep, for the entire western group of nations.
Perhaps, the rape and plunder of India by the British has been responsible for the Indians hard work ethic, preceded of course, with their deep reverence for knowledge. And, as everyone knows, every Indian toddler at the knee of parents or grand parents learns the road to success is only through education and dedicated hard work. The drumming into the head begins early, as even new born Indian babies have their heads filled with the responsibility owed for fulfilling parental dreams of becoming doctors, lawyers, and now, IT-professionals. Who can blame them, when they grow up to achieve what their parents told them they should achieve! This, along with the desire for what the west takes for granted has brought India where it is now i.e. a newly sprung economy determined to make the world its oyster.
Indeed, one must admire the chutzpah of a nation, left but an empty husk by the British, who after dismembering the country in 1947, then left in a massive hurry, leaving it to bleed from open wounds. But, India healed itself, and a lot needs to be said of a nation and a people, who in less than 60-years of freedom from the British yoke have more Indian firms established in their erstwhile rulers home country, than the British do in their erstwhile colony!
Mr. Luff, you are bang on when you affirm the British are too lazy to compete with India. Perhaps, there is a lesson there for everyone. Prosperity makes for complacency and complacency makes for laziness, which in turn leads to poverty. The Karmic Wheel of Fortune comes full circle i.e India on its way, once again, to being the richest country on earth, to representatives of Great Britain (remember Sir Thomas Roe hanging around Jahangir s court, trying to coax a royal firman out of the Mughal Emperor that would allow the British to trade in India) like Luff and others, wanting a lucrative trade deal with India! History repeats itself, albeit with a difference. This time round it will be an Indian Raj instead of British, a vow every Indian should make to themselves and the nation! A mantra they should repeat with every breath they take!
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