Reflecting India’s economic explosion, finely manicured lawns resemble those found in middle-American suburbs as Sirisha Gummaregula heads off to work. She finds her job exciting in Hyderabad, a city in southern India at the center of the country’s high-tech revolution; one area of Hyderabad, in fact, is called high-tech city. India is a nation of high-tech innovation amidst traditional poverty. Gummaregula’s office block houses several high-tech firms, including Google, besides her own company, a legal firm called QuisLex, where she is chief operating officer. She joined the firm five years ago when she returned to India after more than a decade as an attorney in Manhattan. She finds a huge difference in the India she left and the one to which she returned, a difference transforming Hyderabad and other cities and reshaping India’s economy. The growth of the high-tech sector has been the major driving force, helping India achieve record GDP growth of more than 8 percent every year since 2004. At QuisLex, the concept of outsourcing goes well beyond the India call centers that many U.S. companies use to provide customer service. About 200 young attorneys analyze legal documents e-mailed to them by U.S. law firms. They comb through depositions, draft contracts, and perform much of the grunt work that would occupy hours of billable time by more expensive U.S.-based attorneys. The combination of modern technology and a competent low-wage work force is helping QuisLex and other companies make major contributions to India’s growth. The average salary of attorneys at QuisLex is about 20 percent of their U.S. counterparts’. In this area of the economy demand continues to outpace supply as a recession leads more U.S. law firms to search for cost-efficient ways of doing business.
As new shopping malls and Western hotels continue to be built outside the capital of New Delhi, in addition to a subway system, the economy is slowing because of the global recession. According to Amit Mitra, who heads the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, representing 1,500 leading Indian enterprises, a growth rate of 9 to 10 percent is needed to sustain the current economy. Growth estimates have been cut to 6 or 7 percent, still impressive considering the constriction in other parts of the world. Nonetheless, reduced growth alarms representatives of Indian business. To understand why, you need only to drive a few hours from Hyderabad to find an agricultural economy operated at a most basic level. Here, in small farming villages, hundreds of families eke out a living growing ginger, watermelons and wheat.
Over two thirds of India’s billion plus population still live in agricultural communities. In a good year, a farmer may earn around $1,000 in U.S. dollars. Farmers lack electricity and water and don’t earn enough to support a family. Without jobs in the cities, an army of people still scrapes for a living in rural India, relying on the land to sustain them. While resources pour into India’s high-tech sector, the agricultural economy remains so underdeveloped that a quarter of the country’s crops rot before they can be sold or consumed.
New Delhi-based economist Suhel Seth notes that while the world focuses on the impressive economic growth being achieved in Indian cities, it is failing to notice that the majority of Indians have not seen improvement in their daily lives. Back at QuisLex and enterprises like it throughout India, the focus remains on forging ahead. Sarisha Gummaregula argues that given enough time, India’s progress will reach all sectors of society.
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