Education and Information Technology

40 percent of the world population (primarily in rural areas), have rich histories and aspire to superpower status, share a border with contended territory, have growing middle classes that are an important global market, and are major producers and polluters. China and India have very different political and economic systems, but both have assigned high priority to information technology and the Internet, and the Internet may play a pivotal role in the development of the relationship between the two nations. Their differences act as an experiment, shedding light on Internet diffusion and development in general. India and China are home to a large percentage of the world's impoverished people. If the Internet is to improve the state of human development, it must succeed in India and China.

India’s fastest growing and most profitable service sector is high technology—this in a land where little more than 1 percent of people own a personal computer and 50,000 villages lack even a single telephone. India views its skill in IT, not just as the basis for a profitable export industry, but as a force multiplier to improve its military and—by making India an indispensable component of the global high-tech economy—a route to greater influence in world affairs. India wants to be a Great Power, and IT is the tool by which it hopes to achieve that goal. Indian planners believe they have a good chance—and in this they are correct—because the tiger has two assets that the dragon to the North cannot match: Thanks to long British rule, English is a native language spoken by virtually every educated Indian; by 2010, India will have the largest population of English speakers in the world, overtaking the United States. And during the 1990s, India built one of the world’s largest infrastructures for technical education. Indian universities graduate about 70,000 computer scientists and engineer each year, plus a host of physicians, geneticists, and other high-tech specialists. As a result, India is now home to the second-largest population of English-speaking scientists, engineers, and technicians in the world; it turns out more of them each year than the rest of the world combined. According to some of their American peers, India’s geneticists are capable of world-class research, while its best computer scientists are on a par with those of Silicon Valley.

Even its average "techies" are more than good enough. There are estimated 5,000 information-technology software and service companies in India. About 40 percent are multinational firms with operations in India; the rest are domestic players. The Indian software industry alone aims to export more than $50 billion worth of product by 2008. In all, IT adds more than 3 percent to India’s GDP.

The well-respected analysts at IDC India predict that the total Indian IT market, both domestic and export, will grow at a rate of nearly 28 percent annually between 2002 and 2006.
The hottest segment of the industry now is outsourcing, taking on functions such as telephone support and payroll processing for companies in the United States and Europe. Somewhere between half and two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies now outsource IT-related services to India, and most of the rest at least intend to experiment with outsourcing. At that, Indian IT planners are probably disappointed. In 1999, they set a goal of outsourcing software programming for at least 400 of the Fortune 500 no later than 2004. They probably will not have long to wait. An estimated 3.5 million American jobs will migrate to Indian outsourcing firms by 2015.

Thoughts on education: a society's growth is and will always be related to the aid of education. Not only is learning a significant stage in a lifetime, it represents a generation's direction and pace. The difference between one country and the other usually relies on their teaching methods, thus we must stand from our society's point of view – whether it's democracy or a restraint on freedom, one thing is clear – it brings hope for a better tomorrow.