Not surprisingly, he termed India a center of knowledge-intensive human capital and China a factory.
But he also claimed that India’s growth was in large part being domestically fed. With domestic consumption of services growing at a 25% annual clip, Ramadorai termed the growth highly sustainable. He confidently predicted that the service sector should continue growing 8% to 10% annually, and the IT sector specifically, doubling to 2.6 million professionals by 2010.
He recounted a recent trip with a delegation of Indian software companies to three high tech regions in China, meeting with politicians, academia, and private software firms. He said that everyone said the same thing: We want to learn from you, you’re the best, and we want to beat you and become a global player. Help us.
His response was that India would help, but only if China truly opened up its domestic market. In that sense, Ramadorai implied that the Japanese model of the 1980s, which flooded the world with exported products and services while still keeping its domestic market closed, would not fly in the IT space.
Nonetheless, prospective rivalries aside, Ramadorai noted there is good potential for collaboration.
Dealing with concerns that India’s growth is draining jobs from more established economies, Ramadorai contended that India was subject to the same pressures in sectors such as steel manufacturing, as the economy shifts more to a service orientation. Temporary job losses will happen.
While he acknowledged that the government today is being far more cooperative to NASSCOM (the Indian IT association) and the private sector in general, Ramadorai said that his and other companies are building in spite of the government, not because of government.
