Harsh Raj is a second year BA Student at St Aloysius College, Mangalore
The policy of liberalization, privatization, and globalization (LPG), was accepted by the Indian government in the year1990-1991 through which India took a progressive step by joining its hands with the international community in the matters of trade and commerce. Because of this, many significant developments took place much ahead of its time in India. Changes like devaluation of the Indian currency, permission granted to the foreign investment up to 50% in Indian business propositions, liberal ties with the progressive and developed nations etc.
In India, BPOs or Business Process Outsourcing is one of the by-products of LPG policy. A BPO job has been one of its major highlights since the beginning of the 1990s. Today, India is dubbed as the back office capital of the world. Following its lines are countries like China, Pakistan and other south East Asian countries. These BPOs provide back office supports to their offices established worldwide work like- billing, customer care, creating client database, establishing new business contacts etc that needs nothing more than an advanced communication skills in foreign accent, and basic mathematics in some cases. These are established in the developing countries since there is a large exploitable human resource and it would be comparatively cheap to establish the infrastructure than in some advanced countries.
With increasingly higher pay packages than the national average income they woo almost every youngster who dreams of having a high paid job. And to a great extent, these MNCs have come as a savior to our economy when there was a burden of providing employment to the people along with the rise in the population.
Even though establishing these industries has certain advantages, there are also several disadvantages. The major problem caused by these industries is that, they are pushing India exclusively to the field of (tertiary sector) service sector, creates a scope for brain drain in its own country. Earlier, students used to make an effort to find jobs of their choice, but today, students and graduates with higher qualifications just plunge into this field because of the pay package it offers and thereby drift away from their own field of study.
Being myself, a part of this system sometimes ago it was very difficult to change the routine lifestyle to night shifts, late night phone calls, sitting in front of the computer over night, listening to customer queries and abuses, coping with the deadlines, hangover syndromes in the early morning, eating packed food, etc. It altogether changes our biological clock, and it also gives some unique kind of psychological syndrome which restricts our potential creating a sense of inferiority and creates ill- effects on our health. So the price we pay to earn a little is more than we anticipated.
A lot of youngsters working in these facilities face a lot of psychological distress and many of them seek the support of professional counselors, and they, by looking at the background of these individuals who have moved away from their families seeking an independent lifestyle find that most of them who are born and brought up in a typical Indian family are not suited for this kind of environment. But now, in the city, these youngsters not only lack emotional support from their family along with their idle economic resources, they also resort to habits like drinking, smoking, drug abuse etc and try to pacify themselves.
Moreover, for a country dependence on foreign economy gives a scope for economic vulnerability as it becomes too much dependent on favorable foreign business conditions. It also becomes difficult for the government to make independent foreign or domestic policies giving a scope for a foreign government through their chain of its business establishment to establish an indirect control in the national policies thereby compromising our own national welfare. Today as we see the state governments are trying to develop the infrastructure just to create a favorable condition for the working of the MNC?s rather than serving the public interest.
So as a conclusion I would like to add that globalization is a universal process and everyone must participate in it as a responsible citizen of the global community with a wider perspective. MNC’s highlight their ?HIGH? standard of pay scale but people must realize that this is just the part of a marketing strategy of the MNC’s in order to hide some of the major flaws in their system. The individuals must evaluate themselves and their working conditions from all the angles and then take the decision.
While accepting the multinational companies for good, the domestic requirements of the country must not be ignored. At the same time we should not create a scenario for foreign domination.
Author: Harsh Raj- Mangalore