Where will we find them?

"More than two decades ago, India began its transformation into a global IT powerhouse, ushering in an era of job creation never before seen in the country," CNN. "India's software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry could be worth $1 trillion in value by 2030and create nearly half a million new jobs, according to a recent report by consulting firm McKinsey and Co and SaaSBhoomi, a community of industry leaders." But, "Indian engineers trained in the IT industry may find it hard to develop the discipline required to build a product-focused company." "India's top IT firms -- TCS, Info, HCL and Wipro -- plan to hire more than 1 lakh (100,000) freshers this fiscal. But intent and ability to hire are different things, explains Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno." "To onboard around 400 laterals a day IT firm would need to make offers to 700 people a day, as IT services enterprises have a dropout ratio of more than 40%, said Karanth." "Offer acceptance rates have fallen dramatically, especially for skills with severe shortages." However, there are dangers. "The Sangh parivar's zeal to brand critics and dissidents as 'anti-national' took an interesting turn when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's Hindi language mouthpiece, Panchjanya, accused the Indian IT giant Infosys of destabilising the Indian economy to help 'Naxals, Leftists and tukde tukde gang'," The Wire. The accusations against Infosys is because of technical problems with the new income tax software developed by the company. The article then "went on to add that glitches in websites developed by Infosys could be intentional and may be an opposition ploy to force the government to 'change its policy of giving contracts to Indian companies' and 'hurt the idea of Atmanirbhar Bharat', The Indian Express reported." Defending Infosys, "Former director of Infosys, Mohandas Pai, believes that the chaos between the government and the Indian tech giant Infosys arises from the 'gap between ability and expectations on both sides'. In an interview with Swarajya magazine, Pai said that those at Infosys and other IT firms are technologists and not deep domain experts on matters related to tax. He further said that the IT major could have roped in CAs from ICAI to test the IT portal's efficacy from the end user point of view." Why blame Infosys? Now living in the US, JP Singh wanted to renew his Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card online at the website designed by a private company VFS Global. "The VFS website comes with pages and pages of instructions -- a PDF file in fact, on how to obtain an OCI card and what to fill out at each step." "The intricacies and opacities of rules is such that applications for anything can be denied, rules reinterpreted and justified, and the supplicants blamed at any stage," The Wire. "Specially marked towels, height-adjustable chairs to rise above the rest, a tsunami of permissions and an unrelenting battle to improve punctuality," BBC. "These are some of the features about India's bureaucracy," wrote Prof Kaushik Basu who was Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012, wikipedia. He found that "one needed permission for the smallest of things in the government. (India's government accounts for 57% of formal employment in the country)." "Hiding data to please political masters is not only harming the once-stellar reputation of the country but also preventing policy-makers from taking corrective measures, said Prof Basu," telegraphindia. "India is a pioneer in data collection. PC Mahalanobis was known for his contribution to the world in the field of data collection....But it's unfortunate that when things go wrong, there are attempts to hide data," Basu said. "The pandemic-induced closures have resulted in 'catastrophic consequences' for students, especially for those in rural areas, with a mere 8% studying regularly online and 37% not studying at all, according to a new survey," Indian Express. $1 trillion SaaS industry will create half a million new jobs. But where will we find them? With no computers and no education.