Community Insights

The Missing Half Hour: India Rising

By Nelson Heller, President, EdNET at MDR

New Delhi, India

We had been here less than 24 hours, less time than it had taken us to transit from New York, when we discovered that our carefully reset watches were off by half an hour. What? An hour maybe, but 30 minutes?

Yes, we're ten and a half hours ahead of the clock at the JFK gate from which we departed last Saturday evening. No-one I've asked has been able to explain this quirk of the single time zone covering of the entire country. It's probably a long-ago compromise between two zones that would've otherwise spanned the sub continent.

It probably doesn't matter. Even in this brief time, it strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for this nation with one massive foot in the third world and another solidly fixed in the first - maybe even ahead of the first.

I'd worked out a visit with one of the high-tech outsourcing firms I'd met through the EdNET network. They thoughtfully sent a car to pick us up at our hotel. We drove for almost an hour through smoggy dusty haze and congested streets where our driver navigated with his horn in non-existent spaces between motorcycles, trucks, busses, bicycles, wagons, the occasional sacred hump-backed cow and pedestrians. Street vendors and market stalls were everywhere, as were bands of kids hawking goods to the stalled traffic at major intersections.

Our destination was a campus of handsome new office towers that reminded me of Microsoft's in Redmond. Inside seemed comfortably familiar, with young people busy at computers and in small group meetings. We met with two of the firm's international business development staff, bright, polished and friendly. The firm, now 400 strong and growing fast, serves educational publishers around the world with a growing array of services from digital conversion to graphics, assessment products and 3D game development. Almost all their customers were familiar names; I even recognized the names of many of the execs in those firms with whom they work. For one graphics heavy project they created some 45,000 images, producing up to 2,500 a day in the final two weeks. All this using advanced development platforms honed over the past ten years.

They live on Skype video calls, Go To Meeting conferences and, when needed, airplanes and customer sites. They are all about scalability, even outsourcing parts of projects to other Indian outsourcing firms.

Here Thomas Friedman's flat world is their life blood, bringing wealth to their country and value to their far flung clients. Clearly, for those accustomed to owning the value chain, the tectonic forces bubbling up here foretell the future of educational publishing. See it as a threat or opportunity, but get ready to deal with it.