India Inc. -- Call Centers, Surgeons, Tutors Serve Americans
March 2, 2006 — -- If you call an 800 number for help the next time your computer crashes or your oven breaks, chances are someone in India will answer.
While you sleep, bits of your life -- your insurance forms, credit scores and X-rays -- are being processed in Delhi and Bangalore.
Many U.S. companies are outsourcing customer service, tech and other jobs to India, where they've discovered an educated, cheap -- and with 1.1 billion people, huge -- work force.
Keeping India's economy healthy and growing is crucial to the United States, which wants a strong ally in that part of the world. But many American workers are concerned about their jobs being moved overseas.
As President Bush makes his first visit to India during his presidency, ABC News examines the importance of the world's largest democracy, and how it affects everyday life in the United States.
Like 'Talking to a Child'
For a starting salary of $3,200 a year, a million upwardly mobile Indians spend their nights answering questions from confused appliance owners across the globe.
Customer service is a $23 billion-a-year industry in India. It empowers half a million women and forces the traditional society to accept the alarming notion of young ladies being out of the house all night.
Most who work in these call centers are highly educated. In his best-selling novel, "One Night at the Call Center," Chetan Bhagat exposes the frustrations of the job. At one call center he researched, workers posted signs that read "35=10."
"They'd say that a 35-year-old American's IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's IQ. So imagine you're talking to a child. Don't lose your cool when you're talking to them. But this is exactly what is being taught," Bhagat said.
What Americans don't hear are the curses back. It's common practice to put the call on hold and unleash a verbal barrage right back.
Overseas Tutors
As time goes by, it is not just companies tapping into India's cheap brainpower. When Texas mom Elizabeth Mitchell saw her son Jason struggling with math, she hired a tutor -- in India.
"I've wondered what kind of house she lives in. And I've wondered what her parents are like. But she seems really nice," Jason said of his 24-year-old tutor, Swati Chopra.
Chopra uses her computer and phone in Delhi to teach Jason algebra in Plano, Texas. She has to make some cultural adjustments to her teaching method, she said.
"In India, you can scold kids. But there you have to be very patient with them. You have to be very sweet with them. 'Let's play a game and maybe after that you'll feel like doing it,'" Chopra said.
While math is now Jason's best subject, Chopra has drawn a sobering conclusion from the rest of her students.
"If you teach a student in India who's in the seventh grade, and you teach a student in the U.S. who's in the 10th grade, their level will be the same," she said. "There's a gap of at least three grades between the students."
The reverence for education is strong in India, but the demand is so great, teachers are forced to innovate. One group has installed computers in the walls of Delhi slums so children can walk up, log on, and teach themselves English.
Strides in Health Care, Energy
Some Americans are even traveling to India for surgery.
Insurance wouldn't cover truck driver Dennis Berry's hip surgery, and he couldn't afford a $120,000 operation. So Berry flew to Delhi where a world-class surgeon replaced both of his hips for $20,000. That $20,000 included airline tickets for him and a friend, and the cost of staying there.
"The average person can't afford it anymore," Berry said. "And for a major surgery I'd have to sell my house to have it done."
Much the way Indians have revolutionized office work, one Bangalore hospital is re-inventing health care.
It's streamlined open-heart surgery procedures, driving the cost below $2,000 -- with a mortality rate lower than even U.S. hospitals.
And some rural villages are on the cutting edge of cheap renewable energy.
Solar-powered systems that cost about $50 are lighting huts and changing lives. With 80 million Indian homes still in the dark, the scale of the demand may eventually bring the cost of this technology down for all of us.
Outsourcing Impact
While some Americans are concerned about the impact of outsourcing on the domestic economy, it turns out that India isn't siphoning millions of jobs after all. In fact, the American tech sector has grown by 17 percent since outsourcing began, and the Bureau of Labor predicts a million new tech jobs will be created in the United States in the next decade.
"The numbers of jobs going to India for purely outsourcing reasons is quite small," said Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International editor. "We've got to remember, we've been outsourcing goods or services for 70 years in America, and all that time average American incomes have risen to now be the highest in the world. So, if outsourcing's been a bad idea, for 70 years, we've been doing it and doing pretty well."
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says that dialing India not only makes American businesses stronger, it also makes the world safer. Just a few years ago, India and Pakistan were on the brink of nuclear war.
"The Indian business community, particularly the high-tech community, came to the leaders in New Delhi and said, 'Ah, could you please not use the N-word? Nuclear? Because we're like running the backrooms of the world's biggest companies from American Express to General Electric and we can't take a week off for war,'" Friedman said.
"And the government got the message. That cease-fire [was] not brought to you by [former U.S. Secretary of State] General Powell. That cease-fire [was] brought to you by General Electric."
That's something to think about the next time you dial India.