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The Story of an Indian
2004-7-23
Here is the story of a fictional Indian, named Akash Raman. It illustrates the side of the question of outsourcing that nobody in the first world talks about. It is more emotional than I’d like, but so are the accounts of American or Japanese or German workers who lost their jobs because of outsourcing.
Akash Raman was born in October 1992 to fairly wealthy parents in Chennai, the capital and largest city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As in most upper-class Indian families, Akash’s parents emphasized success and achievements and prodded him to go to a good school, then a good university, and from then, a high-paying job. It was the early 00s, and Akash was a ten-year-old boy, so it was clear that Akash should become a programmer, something he had had a fascination for for a few years by then.
Akash went to a top-tier high school, a boarding school in Delhi. The school, of course, taught in English, a language Akash had already been exposed to at home, alongside his native language Tamil. In addition, he learned Hindi at school, and as the majority of students came from Hindi-speaking families, he had many opportunities to practice the language. By the time he would finish high school in June 2010, he’d be trilingual, therefore.
The pressure to succeed drove Akash on at school. Will was not enough, but Akash was exceptionally intelligent and hardworking. While he clearly focused on being good at mathematics and science, he wanted to get as high grades as possible, and ended up falling just short of straight A’s.
For university, Akash applied to the Indian Institute of Technology, a six-campus government-funded college in India. The IIT was so demanding that it admitted only two percent of applicants, and had so rigorous a curriculum that students who then went on to get their Ph.D.s in the United States found even the Ivy League universities easy in comparison. Akash scored very highly on the Joint Entrance Examination that was required of all IIT applicants, and was one of the two percent who got in.
He went to study in the IIT’s Chennai campus. Chennai was his native city, after all, and had a burgeoning IT industry. American, European, and Japanese companies were racing to gain footholds in Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, all notable for their IT industries. Even if Akash got a relatively low average, such as a C, he’d be good enough for a job in software engineering, although he strived for an A for greater success, his personal pride, and, most of all, access to the best possible position.
India was the land of opportunity for software developers; immigration laws all but sealed them from the first world, but in India they would work for the same companies they could’ve worked for in the United States or Germany or Japan or Britain, plus they’d get the same quality of life for one quarter the pay. That was what made India so attractive for IT companies in the first place. Akash graduated with an A average, though nowhere near straight A’s, four years after he had entered the IIT, as was usual.
By then, however, things had changed. First, immigration policies in the West and Japan were becoming increasingly restrictive. And second, developed countries started to pass anti-outsourcing laws, first mild but then very aggressive. The EU passed such laws as Eastern Europe’s GDP per capita was rising rapidly and was close to being on a par with Western Europe’s, do the issue of protecting European IT workers from Indian IT workers came up. Japan did the same, although the effect was much greater, as more Indians worked for Japanese companies than for European companies although Japan’s GDP was hardly one third of the EU’s.
Then, the United States forced American corporations to pull out, by passing a law saying that all US-based corporations had to observe American laws about minimum wage, working hours, and safety, thruout the world. That was in early 2013, with the election of a particularly protectionist president. Between then and mid-2014, when Akash graduated, the number of IT jobs in India had been cut by 25%, and there was no sign that this trend was about to stop. The recruiters from Apple and Microsoft and Yahoo and Sun Microsystems disappeared from the IIT campus; wages were dropping drastically in those corporations that did continue working in India, but even these did not remain for long as the United States, Europe, and Japan forbade corporations from moving offshore and from employing non-citizens via daughter companies when there were qualified citizens.
Akash went from the IIT straight to unemployment. Although his scholastic achievements were spectacular, he was competing to get into a narrowing sector, in which there was an immense surplus of labor. He had to live off his parents for a while, but a few months later they were ran over by a bus and he was left with no job, no job prospects, and money for a few months.
Unemployment in the IT sector in India peaked in early 2015, when it stood at almost 60%. India’s welfare system had always been bad, but lately it had been becoming even worse as the country tried to reform its economic structure along more free-market lines. In March, Akash ran out of money and was evicted from his tiny apartment in Chennai as he could no longer pay the rent. He had nowhere to go, so he lived on the streets for some time. But that was his first acquaintance with poor life, and he would have to make serious readjustments from the life of an IIT graduate to the life of a beggar; the common poor population of Indian cities was accustomed to things he never thought he’d have to experience.
Over the next three years, Akash experienced ten evictions from the streets, five arrests, sixteen acts of violence, and seven thefts. He had been actively trying to get into prison, but he had no luck there; India had one of the world’s lowest incarceration rates, and its justice system was extraordinarily chaotic. In prison, he’d be sure to get food and shelter, but on the streets he ran the risks of eviction and murder.
He had by now managed to pass off for a genuine poor person. He knew that the other homeless people would shun him if they knew of his background. He couldn’t get any regular job because he was way overqualified, so he had to work on the underground market for a pittance, a pittance that didn’t give him even the most rudimentary needs. A physically large man, he had weighed 80 kilograms when he graduated, but over the last few years, undernourishment had reduced him to less than 70 kg, and the situation was only getting worse.
Then, in early 2021, he made a fatal mistake – namely, addressing a group of white men passing by in English. Poor beggars spoke no English, but they could recognize the language, and at that moment they realized that Akash Raman was not truly one of them. They ostracized him from that point onward, shouting in Tamil, “He’s a rich dog!” whenever someone was about to give him money.
In 2023 things were slightly getting better. The first world relaxed its immigration and outsourcing laws, so the employment situation was improving in India, especially considering that labor supply had been constantly falling for the last ten years. As the first world’s boundary moved south, with countries such as Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, and Malaysia pulling up, there was more demand in India for IT jobs.
However, the situation was not as good as it had been in the first decade of the 21st century. Real wages in IT were barely half what they had been, and more cynical Indians looked forward to the day that unions in Mexico and Argentina and Turkey would cause their respective governments to crack down on outsourcing. Akash found a job, but although his income was several times what it had been in the past, it was still far below what he’d thought he’d earn, plus the hours were long in order to make India as competitive as possible on the international labor market.
Worse, the 31-year-old Akash had good knowledge of the programming languages of the early 2010s, but couldn’t handle newer languages well. Despite his intelligence, he could not compete with fresh graduates from the IIT, who were up-to-date with the IT world of the 20s. And on top of all that, the IT market had been changing, with software engineering becoming less and less needed.
Still, Akash managed to retain his job thruout 2024, and even get a modest raise. However, the standard that his employer demanded was rising much faster than his ability to increase his output. A new surplus of labor was developing, and 22-year-old programmers were still preferred to 32-year-old ones. Akash got no raise in 2025, and in December he was fired as the company he worked for downsized. He had enough job experience to make it to several interviews, but he passed none, as for the better part of the previous eleven and a half years he had been on the streets, reading only common Tamil newspapers.
The threat of a crackdown on outsourcing in new additions to the first world never materialized, but in its stead, age and structural shifts making Akash’s training less needed made Akash unemployed again. This time he managed to stay in a small apartment in a poor quarter of Chennai for a while, but unfortunately he could not share an apartment with anyone in his economic condition, because the secret of his wealthy past would be exposed. Although Akash found a very low-paying job that supported him, his situation was sufficiently miserable that he could no longer pay the rent by mid-2027.
India’s GDP was spectacularly rising, but this rise completely failed to trickle down to the huddled masses, cramped into slums in Mumbai and Delhi and Kolkata and Chennai. The poor villagers became poor slum dwellers; the poor slum dwellers remained hungry, sweating in the sweltering tropical heat, and with no future in sight. At least most of them were literate, so unlike his early begging days, Akash didn’t stand out as one of the few homeless people who could read. The flip side was that he could no longer earn a few rupees as the local reader of newspapers.
In an effort to make the cities look cleaner, the Tamil Nadu state government banned begging and required all homeless people to find shelter. The government did not, however, provide the said shelter, so the end result was that the poorest people in the cities were cordoned into small spaces into which nobody whom they could beg for money entered. Finding a regular job became increasingly harder, too, as underground businesses were raided and their workers arrested.
Sometime in 2030, Akash managed to go to prison for burglary. In fact, he’d been burglarizing homes for the last two years, but never managed to get enough money to improve his quality of life, and only now was finally arrested. However, India’s justice and correction systems were still chaotic, though less than in the past, so he only got two years; he’d been hoping for five or six, which was the maximum penalty for burglary as far as he could remember.
Prison was very far from the safe haven Akash had imagined it as. However, it was far better than living on the streets, working for a pittance and running the risk of violence. He’d been beat up several times in his two years in jail, although he did manage to avoid gang rape. Food was barely enough for subsistence, but he didn’t lose even a single kilogram while in jail.
In 2032, forty-year-old Akash was released. He was now a bum; the conditions of few slum dwellers had improved, and his only became worse, as people tended to avoid criminals. Then, his history was accidentally revealed to his peers, and they started actively loathing him. Local gangsters seized the opportunity and sadistically tortured him for several weeks in mid-2033. Then, they raped him several times. He managed to avoid getting killed only because the gangsters had also attacked someone rich enough to complain and be heard. The law offered no compensation for Akash, the unfortunate victim.
His weight peaked around then at 82 kilograms. Over the next four years, his health would rapidly deteriorate, as he was essentially subject to the whims of slum dwellers who hated him for having once been rich. He eventually found a regular job, again, but the pay was very low, and the workweek was a hundred hours long. He worked alongside twelve-year-old kids whom laws against child labor didn’t protect. And the pay was fit for a twelve-year-old with a family, but not for a forty-one-year-old who was completely alone.
In 2037, Akash, weighing 60 kilograms, caught typhoid. He almost died, but by luck did not; hardly any medicine was available, and people were reluctant to help a “rich dog.” When the demand for software engineers went up again, he was out of luck, as his knowledge was almost 25 years out of date and his English poor. His criminal history was no help. He went to prison again in December that year, but got out four months later due to India’s war on drugs.
In 2040, it seemed that things couldn’t get worse anymore. He had no money whatsoever, no job, and no access to the clique that ran the slum culture of India. India’s growth meant that everything became more expensive, but his nominal income remained as low as ever. Life expectancy in India was then in the mid-seventies for both sexes, but this didn’t seem to affect Akash, whose health was in decline, as he caught disease after disease.
For the next two years, his weight fluctuated wildly, and for several occasions he thought he wouldn’t survive the next week. He was always wrong, however, and in fact he had reached the age of fifty, miserable and penniless. He lost his leg soon afterward, however, in a car accident, and from that point onward became sicker and sicker. He died in early January 2043, a software engineer who never got a real chance to work in his profession.
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