Thursday, January 10, 2013

“India is critical to world’s progress”

In an exclusive interview to B&E’s pathikrit payne, Sir Richard Stagg, British High Commissioner to India speaks about India’s incredible future potential and the positive impact of its outsourcing business...

B&E: How do you look at the transformation of India from the time of Independence to now when it is an emerging powerhouse?

RS:
We view it as an amazing achievement of India. The transformation especially in economy, society and the way in which the country worked in the last 60 years. India has an enormously important role to play in the world. India is a model of how democracy and development can go hand in hand as it has just been shown in the elections, which went off so well. So we view India as a country which has emerged on the world’s scene. It’s now the fourth biggest economy in the world by PPP. It’s critical to almost all critical issues that the world faces, be it trade rounds, development sphere, agreement on climate change, international sponsor to financial crisis. India has put itself in the centre of major issues, which reflects the success of its governance.

B&E: Is there paranoia in the UK about the economic resurgence of India and it becoming an outsourcing hub, as it leads to job losses in UK?

RS:
In the case of India, there’s genuine welcome from almost every political group in UK. UK is very comfortable with the companies using outsourcing as one of the ways to make their business more successful. From our perspective, it makes no sense to constrain the competitiveness of our companies by limiting their ability to outsource. We will not succeed as an economy just by competing for relatively low skilled jobs, which can be done at a lower cost elsewhere. We have to accept that the only way we are going to succeed as a country and as an economy, is by moving up the value chain by doing higher value added tasks. So the government’s challenge is to ensure that as the low skilled jobs leave UK, we provide training and up-skilling to the people affected, so that they can do higher value work in the economy.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPMMalay Chaudhuri
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