Indian call center and the coffee industry -

Al Jazeera - :

"Some have seen in the removal of jobs from Britain an act of historical justice: a kind of retribution for the destruction by Britain of millions of livelihoods in the traditional textile industry of India. Britain destroyed ancient artisanal skills, which can scarcely be compared with the fly-by-night, cyber-coolie labour of call centres. In any case, the flight of labour is no gift to India by the companies shifting there. Outsourcing cuts costs by between 40% and 50%."

Its surprising to see a topic on Indian call center coming up so prominently in the Conspiracy theories at Al Jazeera. This article reminds me about a course GSB Government, Society Business taught by Professor Shivakumar. ( btw my picture is there right at the top of this page making a pointing in the Corporate Strategy course ;o) )

In this course one of the presentation made by a study group was on the coffee industry and the conditions of the workers. This was the first time that I got exposed to this theme. Intrestingly this (ethcis) course was one of the most intresting course during my MBA programme - which reminds me of the fact that the courses that I most enjoyed during my engineering days were the Humanities courses - aptly named by students by Hukka or soft courses.

A course list at IIT-Delhi ( Warning the size of pdf file is 2.7 MB )

But the reasons I found these courses good were because first of all there were no correct or incorrect answers as opposed to all engineering courses . We had good class discussion on various authors, their writing style , dissect their best pieces.