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THE
NEW ECONOMY: CAREERS
Techies
Line Up For Jobs Online
When
business analysts speak of an "information technology (IT) revolution"
in India, they don't just refer to an elite corps of geeks writing sophisticated
programs for clients in the West. Rather, they point to the mass employment
potential of IT, which will truly make it the democratic tool it is meant
to be. IT-enabled services are still in their nascence in India but already
there is a certain excitement about them. This country's English language
skills, its 12-hours odd difference with the US time zones-India works
while America sleeps-and the cheap cost of labour could make it a big
player in the IT services market.
All this
is already happening. In 1999, the IT-enabled services industry employed
41,000 people and earned a revenue of Rs 2,030 crore. The participation
in NASSCOM's annual meet has doubled in just one year. By 2008, a NASSCOM
survey predicts, 11 lakh employees could be helping the industry ear Rs
81,000 crore. Should this aspiration be realised, it will at once bolster
India's. foreign-exchange reserves and nail the myth that the computer
is a misfit and a job destroyer in a largely poor country. It will also
boost India's image as a service sector-oriented economy. Five studies
of pathfinders follow.
Web
Designing
Weaving A Golden Web
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Tejas
Mangeshkar(right)
Founder, Grandmother
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Qualifications:
Sense
of aesthetics, a degree
in art would help |
Starting
Salary:
Rs 10,000-15,000 a month |
| Employment:
12,000 in 1999; 3,00,000 in 2008 (projection) |
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Revenue:
Rs 610 crore in 1999; Rs 25,000 crore
in 2008 (projection)
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Grandmother
might not have approved of the orange walls, bad-for-posture-beanbags
and late nights but then she doesn't have to find out, right? In another
age, 24-year-old Kunal Rawat, the bespectacled-khadi kurta clad-JJ College
(Mumbai) art graduate would probably have been aiming to be Husain/Raza
and busting his days and nights at an ad agency. And 25-year-old computer
geek Tejas Mangeshkar would have been among the smart but gainfully unemployed.
Not in the Net or should that be web age.
Pooling
their talents the duo created Grandmother (because it was grandma who
offered her Shivaji Park balcony to house their solitary computer), one
of India's buzzing web design outfits where clients have learnt to live
with statements like ''We'll start your work only next month.''
Today the
duo, who prefer to geek-explain their work as ''interweaving multiple
media including print and web in the continuing search for the most relevant
expression'', weave ideas for clients such as MTV. Projects in the past
three years have included installations, music and sound design, typography,
designing brand identities and interactive web design.
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"No
run-of-the-mill stuff this. It is a medium for those who want to
experiment."
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According
to Mangeshkar, choosing the right server is as important as balancing
mediums to blend with creativity. ''There is no point in putting up fantastic
pictures if the surfer has to wait for 20 minutes to download them. Creative
inputs have to be fused with practical, real time effort,'' he says.
The technical
gang too is well experienced and is ''constantly encouraged to surf the
Net to keep themselves updated,'' he adds. Well, they've got designs on
a fortune.
-Himanshi Dhawan
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