‘The world is flat’

NEW YORK: While acknowledging the “individual trauma” of Americans who lose jobs when companies move operations abroad President George W Bush raised hackles by insisting that outsourcing to India has overall benefits. US media resorted to deep sarcasm in taking Bush to task for his comments on outsourcing in a speech to Asia Society.

“To people in Silicon Valley and around the country concerned about the outsourcing of jobs to India, President Bush offered something to make the practice more palatable. Pizza,” noted The Mercury News.

“India’s middle class is buying air-conditioners, kitchen appliances and washing machines, and a lot of them from American companies like GE and Whirlpool and Westinghouse. And that means their job base is growing here in the US. Younger Indians are acquiring a taste for pizzas from Domino’s, Pizza Hut,” Bush had told the Asia Society.

American trade expert Henry Rowen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, had a different take saying economic growth doesn’t exactly balance the drawbacks of outsourcing. “Certainly there’s some positives and some negatives. The net is a little tricky. The consumer benefits from all this, but there’s an impact,” Rowen, who has co-edited a book “Making IT: The Rise of Asia in Information Technologies” told The Mercury News.

“Bush needs to be himself outsourced for the complete lack of understanding of this issue. The growth of the Indian economy is a good thing but it does not need to be at the expense of the American economy,” Sona Shah, who has co-drafted a bill with Senator Bill Pascerell to overhaul the H1-B visa programme, told DNA. “When he talks of pizzas he blindly ignores the outsourcing of science and engineering design to India. It would be laughable if the consequences were not so significant,” said the 34-year-old Indian American computer engineer who is fighting a legal battle that can rewrite worker’s rights in corporate America.

In talking about the benefits of India’s growth, Bush said he was stunned by the size of the Indian middle class estimated at 300 million people; “larger than the entire US population.” “More than five centuries ago, Christopher Columbus set out for India and proved the world was round. Now some look at India’s growing economy and say that proves the world is flat,” Bush said, referring to Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book about globalisation, “The World Is Flat.”