| Mick James looks at the UK’s “special relationship” with India, as it may be about to enter its most remarkable phase yet. |
| From Celebrity Big Brother to consulting: the evolving relationship between the UK and India |
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| | By Mick James
One of the
consequences of creating
a global information
superhighway is that
nothing is trivial
anymore. First we saw
Gordon Brown, our
Chancellor and future
Prime Minister, on a
goodwill tour of India,
having to eat humble pie
over a TV programme he
had no part in and had
never seen. A few days
later, the chairman of
the CBI complained that
the Celebrity Big
Brother furore was
making it harder for
British firms trying to
gain access to India’s
hard-to-crack retail and
financial sectors.
You couldn’t make it
up, but this is the way
the world ends: the
apocalypse will probably
come, not in a bitter
struggle over oil and
nuclear arms, but as a
result of an off-colour
remark by a British
comedian in a Chinese
restaurant.
I have to confess
that, like millions of
others who should know
better, I’ve been glued
to the controversy ever
since it broke. There
were many disturbing
aspects to the whole
affair, but what struck
me was how little people
in this country seem to
“get” the modern India. | |
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| | our lives.
Now India offers us
another get-out of
jail-free card. UK
consumers may have
shopped and borrowed
themselves to death, but
there’s no need to worry
– we can ship our tired
old business models off
to the sub-continent and
enjoy another few good
years.
In all of this there
is a massive failure to
engage with India on the
one level where it has
most to offer –
intellectually. We get
excited over cheap hands
and bulging purses but
good brains leave us
cold.
The think tank Demos
recently produced a
document which
underlined this point,
claiming that Britain
was losing out in the
development of
scientific links with
both India and China. A
government spokesman
responded that that was
precisely what we were
doing, but it turned out
the disagreement was
more one of scale than
approach, with
investment running at
about a quarter of what
Demos believes is called
for. What the think tank
fears is that in future
Indian and Chinese
students will prefer to
head for the States to | |
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| | gain their scientific
education, and that this
will be the axis of the
scientific communities
of the future. The
report’s authors claimed
that Britain was
“sleepwalking out of its
special relationship
with India because not
enough people have woken
up to how fast the
country is changing”.
Add to this the
spreading perception –
justified or not – that
the UK is still steeped
in racism and blind to
the achievements of
Indians and we’re hardly
going to encourage
bright young students to
pick Silicon Fen over
Silicon Valley.
Is the consultancy
industry guilt-free in
all this? After all,
consultancies have led
the pack in establishing
business links and
subsidiaries in India
and China. But the
tendency has been to
portray this side of the
business as “resources”,
brawn to back up the
consulting brains.
Naturally, firms with
Indian roots don’t
necessarily
conceptualise things
this way. The challenge
as they see it is not to
grow a delivery side to
deliver the downstream
promise for a
consultancy front end. | |
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| | Rather it’s to add
consultancy to a
pre-existing delivery
capability in a way that
allows it to be deployed
more intelligently. I’ve
been lucky enough to
meet with a number of
Indian firms and their
growing consultancy arms
over the last year or
so. They’re definitely
poised to be
super-competitors, but
only if clients are
going to be receptive.
As the Indian economy
continues to grow, so
will the scale and
complexity of
infrastructure and
enterprise projects.
That expertise and
experience can flow back
into the UK – or we can
ignore it and let others
take advantage. What a
shame if the burgeoning
Indian consultancy
industry decided to
bypass Europe and
concentrate its efforts
in the States.
As a country it’s
time we woke up to how
lucky we have been in
our “special
relationship” with
India. It’s possible it
may be about to enter
its most remarkable
phase yet – let’s hope
we don’t throw the
opportunity away.
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| | “Bollywood” may be the
world’s largest film
producer, but as far as
most people in this
country are concerned it
might as well not exist.
Hence the confusion and
suspicion among the Big
Brother cast about the
appearance of an
apparently glamorous and
wealthy film star from
India, to the extent
that some of them
thought she might be a
plant.
It’s easy to dismiss
this profound ignorance
of India as a disease of
the lower orders, but I
feel our business
approach is similarly
blinkered. The
outsourcing boom
positioned India as a
seemingly endless source
of labour arbitrage, the
British captain of
industry’s equivalent of
crack cocaine. The
result has been the
survival and even
proliferation of
massively inefficient
processes, such as the
blanket cold-calling
that is the bane of all | |
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