Employment and exclusion in the Indian IT industry
2006, Dr. Carol Upadhya, National Institute of Advanced Studies
The IT industry in India is often represented as providing employment opportunities to wider sections of the population than is the case for most managerial, professional, and white collar jobs in other more traditional industries. Support for this claim is based on the assumption that employment in this industry does not depend on social connections (influence) or ascriptive social status, but rather is based entirely on merit. This, together with the spread of higher education (especially engineering colleges) in semi-urban and rural areas, have created new employment opportunities for rural youth, the socially and economically disadvantaged, as well as for women. However, a careful study of the employment data throws up a somewhat different picture from the one enumerated earlier. The paper presents data from a study of the IT workforce in Bangalore to show that it is largely urban, middle class and high/middle caste in its social origins and not as inclusive as we seem to believe. It then outlines the filtering processes that operate to create this social homogeneity, including the education system, the recruitment process, and the industry's requirement for a certain type of global IT professional. The paper points to the contradiction between the dominant representation of IT and actual practices of recruitment and employment, as well as the ideological operation of the merit argument against the background of the debate on reservations in the private sector (Adapted from author).