Work is plentiful, work is cheap

In a typical internship in the United States, it's fairly easy to get involved and get busy. There are lots of papers that need sorting and files that need cleaning. "Intern" is sort of synonymous with "the person that does the stuff no one else has time for." Donna and I sort of expected the same sort of thing coming here to the hospital. So naturally, we started looking for the usual ways of keeping interns busy. However, we found that the usual list of intern chores were not available--some people's entire jobs were devoted to those chores. We felt there were very few specific things we could ask to do that wouldn't put someone out of a job. There is simply a very large number of people working at the hospital.

That seems to be true across India. Kevin and Rachel have reported that at Virgo Engineers, much of the work is still done manually (rather than being automated), because hiring a new laborer has a far lower start-up cost than buying new machinery. And since it doesn't cost much to keep a laborer, there is little incentive to automate things. Indeed, labor is extremely inexpensive, making it seem like the entire country is overstaffed. Security guards are everywhere, from door of some of the smallest shops all the way up to the gates of the largest corporations. If it costs almost nothing to put someone there, why wouldn't you?

Yet as I've posted previously, prices will rise, and hiring cheap labor for everything may not be sustainable. For that reason, part of Kevin and Rachel's project is help automate some of the processes at Virgo. It is a wise move, because even though the overhead is high for the equipment to automate, the result is a company that can remain competitive in the West as prices rise.

On the other hand, there is one big advantage to having a tremendous amount of jobs that serve the role of cheap labor. It is, quite simply, the fact that there are jobs available. In a country of over 1 billion, not everyone can be doctors, lawyers, and engineers (in fact, it is extremely difficult for an Indian to rise up to those points). Thus, many people find jobs constructing buildings that in the United States would be undertaken by a much smaller team using bulldozers, dump trucks, cement trucks, and cranes. All of that results in much lower unemployment. China realized the benefit of low unemployment--less civil unrest--and has made sure that everyone living in a city has a permit to work, successfully keeping its citizens occupied.

India's government isn't capable of doing the same thing as China (and even if they could, would they?), but they do have something else that empowers them--jobs from the United States. There's often a concern of jobs being outsourced from the United States. India has become so adept at receiving these outsourced jobs that it has become the source of a plethora of jokes and political rhetoric regarding outsourcing. After all, many of us have complained about having to talk to someone from India when we call technical support, and President Obama himself seemed to oppose outsourcing with his comment "say no to Bangalore and yes to Buffalo" (a comment that was not appreciated by the Indian newspapers over here!). Indeed, many of our IT jobs are now located in places like Bangalore or Pune, and even specialized professions like radiology are starting to be outsourced here.

I believe this is a huge blessing for India. It gives India an educated and rapidly growing elite (though it's still small...for now). Instead of leaving India, they're staying here and expanding the middle class, which as probably been a key to success in the United States. Perhaps more than anything else, the outsourcing has given India English. India was already primed for the move, in large part due to the influence of the British Raj, but having English as a major language makes access to the world market that much easier. In fact, we may have reached a point where more people speak English in India than they do in the United States. In short, India gains wealth, a middle class, better infrastructure, the world's most widely-used language, and a whole host of other things. This indeed will make India an economic force to be reckoned with.