How to eat the world

Should the next 5 million software engineers be hired and trained like the first 5 million?

Software, they say, is eating the world: As business processes get automated, more and more software needs to be written, updated and maintained. Not surprisingly, then, as a dominant provider of software services, India is at the centre of the action.

Even as the value of India’s IT services exports grew an anaemic 2 per cent last year, the slowest in two decades, growth in effort (measured in person hours) accelerated. Revenue growth slowed not only because of business disruptions for customers, but also because onsite work (where engineers travel abroad to work in the offices of their customers) fell