BusinessWeek: America's New Anti-India Backlash

[Newsjock]

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

The increasingly bitter contest over the Democratic Party's nomination for the Arkansas Senate seat now held by Blanche Lincoln offers a preview of the problems that will increasingly strain U.S.-India relations. A business advocacy group, Americans for Job Security, is running television ads attacking Lincoln's challenger, Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter, for profiting from a software company called WebMethods that supposedly outsourced U.S. jobs to India. With Indian music playing in the background, one of the ads features several Indians thanking Halter for sending jobs to Bangalore.

Although Lincoln has condemned the ads as racially offensive, her campaign has distributed mailers, emblazoned with pictures of the Taj Mahal, making the same charge. Halter has denied the accusations.

The events in Arkansas highlight a looming but largely unnoticed challenge for policymakers in Washington and New Delhi. India's ascent as an emerging economic power has brought strategic benefits for a U.S. seeking a geopolitical counterweight to Chinese power in Asia. But India's rise—particularly its role as the world's top outsourcing destination—also means Americans will more and more come to view India as an economic rival, just as Japan was regarded in the 1980s and China is perceived today.

... Obama's health-care reforms also promise to sharpen the outsourcing debate, as U.S. insurance companies, pushed to cut administrative costs, send more IT work to India. As the Economic Times, an Indian business daily, reports, Obamacare gives the outsourcing industry "its biggest bonanza yet ….The opportunity that it throws up for outsourcers is huge and far bigger than the Y2K (computer glitch), which included only changing code."

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2010/gb20100513_405539.htm

[Lost4words]

1. jobs in India dont add to the US tax base.

sell India the gulf of BP its still cleaner than the Ganges!

[aquart]

2. They aren't "cutting costs." They're maintaining their bonuses.

Which is entirely different.

[notesdev]

3. Displace a half million US workers on US soil by undercutting wages for enough years in a row

... and then countless more by offshoring - yeah, there's going to be a backlash to that. The people responsible are lucky that it hasn't yet come to rope and guillotines.