ABSTRACT
To shed light on the future of Indian ICT services, this chapter will examine economist Robert Schware’s ‘walking on two legs’ proposition, that the experience gained from a strong domestic market is critical to export success in the industry. India’s emergence as the world’s largest exporter of a range of ICT services, including software, with considerably smaller production for the domestic market, challenges the proposition. Recently, however, the domestic market in India has become significant, that is, much after exports gained prominence. Since Schware does not offer an explanation for this apparent anomaly, this chapter will provide one by emphasising how the socioeconomic value of ICTs comes from abstracting and encoding practices in various domains of human activity. While the process of abstracting requires proximity to the activity, encoding with technology can take place at a distance as code can be electronically transmitted without loss of quality. India’s exports grew on the basis of labour-intensive services, by relying on customers for domain knowledge. More recently, however, growth has involved pursuing a potentially large domestic market among underprivileged populations who have been served with little or no technology thus far. This chapter will also describe how serving this population requires significant effort, such as building new organisational alliances, to understand their needs before deploying any technology. Thus, instead of a unique trajectory, in which export growth draws on the experience of the domestic market, the Indian software services industry is defined by at least two different trajectories, each with its distinct source of knowledge. The chapter argues that these two trajectories will continue to characterise the future of Indian ICT services.
