If rising wages and growing attrition is anything to go by, the Indian outsourcing boom may soon be headed towards doom. The cost advantage for offshoring to India once stood at 1:6. However, today, it has come down to 1:3. Also, rising attrition and low employee loyalty have reached scary heights. More importantly, India's tech industry is primarily a services industry and not one that is inventing new technology products of its own. Thus, India's $30 billion IT/ITES services industry is slowly but surely losing its competitive advantage. If the cost advantage keeps depleting, it will soon become inefficient to use Indian labor. Already, for many Europeans, Eastern Europe has already become more compelling than India.

Human Resource was always considered a back office maintenance operation. But over the years, Indian companies have realised that to beat the competition, its employees are the only sustainable core competency. As a result, HR has taken centrestage and has started reshaping business strategy. The business strategy which revolved around improving bottomlines has now started to address more important issues. One of such important issues is talent development. Talent has been in short supply across industry verticals. And these days, having a highly talented pool of workers is a promising proposition for companies. In India, many companies have taken the initiative towards developing talents. Infosys has Infosys Leadership Institute in Mysore to prepare people for leadership roles. They also have a Corporate Training Centre for training fresh recruits. Wipro has a full fledged Talent Transformation Centre with full time in-house consultants. IBM has recently launched a ’IBM Drona’ program...

The popular concept 'Teleworking' is now catching up in the Indian corporate scenario. Wipro, an IT engineering service provider, is expecting that 30 percent of its employees shall prefer working from home in the near future. This would mean a reduction in the use of office resources, like office space, power and water which are spent during the office hours of an employee. The company has been positive about this system since a long time, whereby 1, 100 of its employees are teleworking in Bangalore while in Chennai it touches 100. However, there are challenges in the execution of this model, as the mindset of the employees is yet to be moulded to achieve better co-ordination and without any apprehension regarding the salary factor. Also, the effectiveness of the system has to be proved to the clients, to ensure permission from them for those working on customer projects as security-related issues are to be handled. But the company is positive as Mr. Laxman K Badiga, Wipro’s C...