Tough year foreseen for India IT; Ending the rape culture

1 Tough year foreseen for India IT (Dhanya Ann Thoppil in The Wall Street Journal) India’s software exporters are bracing for yet another tough year, with economic uncertainty in their main outsourcing markets of the US and Europe refusing to go away. “We are likely to see some economic tightening in the U.S. due to higher taxes and spending cuts, which will result in tightening of budgets for many IT departments, especially in the public sector,” says Phil Fersht, chief executive of HfS Research, a US-based firm that offers research and analysis services.

This is adding to fears that 2012′s challenges for Indian software companies will roll into 2013. Last year began well for India’s outsourcing companies, with most sounding optimistic about their growth prospects. But as the year progressed, several companies cut their outlooks because of the economic problems in the US and Europe, currency volatility, and policy paralysis in India.

The India National Association of Software and Services Companies — an industry group — has trimmed its export growth forecast for this fiscal year through March to 9%-12% from 11%-14%. India’s top two outsourcing companies scaled back their financial outlooks as well, citing shrinking technology spending. Peter Schumacher, president and chief executive of Germany-based management consulting firm Value Leadership Group Inc., says the demand environment in 2013 will likely “remain tense,” especially during the first six months of the year.

For Indian service providers, an additional headwind could be a likely increase in the value of the rupee against the US dollar. Most outsourcing companies convert all their foreign revenue first into dollars and then into rupees. A strong local currency squeezes revenue when converting overseas takings into rupees.

2 Ending the rape culture (Naomi Wolf in Khaleej Times) The crime seems incomprehensible. A 23-year-old physiotherapy student is dead, 12 days after having been raped for more than an hour by six men in a bus traveling on main roads in the Indian capital, New Delhi. Her internal injuries from the iron rod that her attackers used were so severe that doctors had to remove her intestines in their effort to save her life.

The deeper truth underlying the protests following the Delhi incident can be found on blogs, where young Indian men and women bemoan the fact that travel guidebooks routinely warn women about pervasive sexual harassment in India, and advise them to move around in groups. A “male-cosseting culture,” as one blogger put it, in turn supports a rape culture.

The connection between rape, male privilege, and female sexual vilification was one of the key insights of feminists in the 1970’s – an insight that they thought had been successfully applied to cultural debate about rape, and to law. Women and men who support freedom of movement and safety from sex crimes are being forced to refight that battle. One hopes that the protests in India will inspire the West to emulate the protesters’ lack of complacency.

In the developing world, women are in special jeopardy. Their embrace of autonomy and mobility risks putting them in conflict with a law-enforcement establishment and media that still view women through a pre-feminist lens: “good girls” who stay at home should not be raped, while “bad girls” who stake a claim to public space are fair game.