Digital Labour and Karl Marx by Christian Fuchs

Author:Christian Fuchs [Fuchs, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781134747207
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

Primary economic sector (agriculture and mining)

53.7%

17.0%

Secondary economic sector (manufacturing)

20.9%

24.2%

Tertiary economic sector (services)

25.4%

58.9%

Source: NSSO (2012, table S36), ICSSR (2012, 36) 1

8.2. The Indian Software Industry’s Productive Forces in the International Division of Digital Labour: Labour-Power and the Objects, Tools and Products of Labour

In the mid-1980s, the Indian government started to progressively liberalize regulations in order to attract investments by international capital to the software industry (Lakha 1994). After the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi became the new Indian prime minister and substituted the old politics of techno-nationalism by politics that modernized and liberalized communications, which resulted in a deregulation of the computer industry and the focus on the attraction of foreign capital and export orientation of the Indian ICT economy (Chakravartty 2004, Upadhya and Vasavi 2008). Software technology parks emerged in Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Pune, Madras and Hyderabad. International software companies feel attracted by India’s high amount of university-educated engineers, relatively good English skills and low-level wages (Lakha 1994). Citigroup (USA) and Texas Instruments (USA) are two of the TNCs that entered the Indian software market relatively early in the mid-1980s; later others such as Alcatel, British Telecom, Cadence, HP, IBM, LG Electronics, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle and Philips followed (Arora, Gambardella and Torrisi 2001; D’Costa 2002).

In 2012, India attracted 58% of all outsourced IT and business processes (call centres, customer services, HR, finance, accounting) (NASSCOM 2012), which shows the importance of the Indian software sector in the IDDL. Table 8.2 shows that the export orientation of parts of the Indian manufacturing industry has also characterized the Indian software industry: in the decade 2000–2009, it had annual growth rates between 11% and 51%. At the same time, the export orientation of the industry has increased from roughly 50% to more than 75%. In 2010, software services accounted for 54.4% of all exported services in India (Ministry of Finance 2011, 166). In 2011, this value increased to around 58% (NASSCOM 2012). In 1997–1998, the United States accounted for 58% of all Indian software exports (Arora, Gambardella and Torrisi 2001). In 2009, exported software accounted for 58.7% of the value of the Indian electronics and IT (hardware and software) production, domestic software only for 15.5% (Ministry of Finance 2011, 221). In 2010, total FDI inflows into the hardware and software industry accounted for 3.0% of all FDI inflows, whereas in 2009 they accounted for 7.8%, which shows that the global capitalist crisis has negatively affected capital export in the software industry (ibid., 225). The total volume of FDI inflows in the Indian software industry decreased by 58.6% in 2010 in comparison to 2009 (ibid.). Although the Indian software industry has had a huge growth rate and a large share of exports in services, in 2009 it accounted for only 0.5% of the total Indian labour force and in 2012 for 0.6%. This circumstance shows that given the fact that India is the second largest country in the world (following China), its mere size poses an attractive location for the outsourcing of ICT services for Western companies in order to increase profit rates by decreasing overall wage costs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.