Outsourcing Delivers Hope to India

CHENNAI, India – In the traditional Brahmin neighborhood where he lives with his aging parents, Shyam Natarajan begins his day with a trip to the family prayer room. He daubs vermilion powder on his brow, lights incense and an oil lamp and chants Sanskrit verse to a portrait of Surya, the sun god, before heading out the door to work.

A few hours later, in a hushed, air-conditioned sanctuary behind a door marked “Great Minds at Work – Do Not Disturb,” Natarajan sits in front of a computer screen and prepares to change the life, in a small but beneficial way, of a police officer and his wife in Kansas.

Fortified with several cups of strong South Indian coffee, Natarajan evaluates the couple’s request for an $18,000 home equity loan, poring over application forms, credit reports and other data supplied by E-Loan, an Internet-based lending company headquartered in Pleasanton, Calif. Fifty minutes later, satisfied that the applicants are a good risk, he recommends the loan for approval.

Natarajan, 24, a slender, goateed vegetarian who likes volleyball and Led Zeppelin and expects his parents to find him a suitable bride, is one of the thousands of young Indians who have profited from the boom in outsourcing of service jobs by U.S. firms lured by India’s low labor costs and large pool of English-speaking talent.

In the United States, the trend has sparked a political backlash and a flurry of legislative proposals to discourage the practice. Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has denounced “Benedict Arnold” corporate chiefs who send white-collar jobs abroad.

But to spend time in the E-Loan operation of Wipro Spectramind, a large Indian firm that provides back-office support for clients in the United States and elsewhere, is to grasp the ruthless economic logic of outsourcing – at least for some business tasks – and why the trend might be difficult, if not impossible, to arrest.

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