'The Indian-born naturalised US citizen, who cut his teeth as a manager for Pepsi and General Electric, has transformed Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies from a modest $100 million Indian software contractor in 1999 into a $1.2 billion offshoring juggernaut today,' says the article, titled 'Indo-American in maelstrom of offshoring controversy.'
Outsourcing and India: Complete Coverage
But Wipro and its other Indian competitors like Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services are 'loathed by labor activists' not just for exporting jobs, but also for reportedly bringing down local wages by hiring cheaper labour from India, the article says.
Paul, 45, 'is an unapologetic believer in the virtues of making US companies more efficient through offshoring -- an activity that at the same time helps raise living standards in his impoverished homeland,' it says.
'But he also expresses compassion for the American workers who lose out in the bargain.'
'If we can unlock all the brains of the world to work together in a smooth, collaborative way, we can do nothing but benefit. But we've got to figure out how to manage our way through this transition,' the article quotes him as saying in an interview.
'We've got to take care of the people who are disenfranchised, because one person suffering is one person too many. We need to expand unemployment benefits, not cut them back. We need to give more incentives for retaining.'
Paul also criticised the three anti-offshoring bills passed by the California Legislature last month.
While one seeks to bar state agencies from outsourcing, another seeks to impose restrictions on material containing medical and financial information. A third proposes a bar on any material which relates to homeland security.
According to Paul, 'Very few of the state agencies outsource to India anyway, so it would affect an infinitesimally small portion of what they do and what we do. But it's a bad precedent, because the government would be taking a bigger role in telling agencies how to spend money.'
As for privacy, "We already have solutions where we can do data masking, and strip the name and the Social Security number," the Mercury News article quotes him as saying. "It's a question of the customer's comfort level. E-Loan, one of our clients, did an experiment and gave customers the choice, telling them, 'press 1 if you want your loan processed in India in one day, or press 2 if you want your loan processed in the US in three days.' And 70 per cent of the people who called in pressed 1."
But he also concedes there were cases of US technology workers who were forced to train their Indian replacements before losing their jobs.
"There were a couple of companies that did this 'train your successor or we won't pay your termination benefits,' and I think they did a great disservice to the entire industry," he told Mercury News.
Profiling the 'strict vegetarian of Brahmin heritage,' the article says Paul, a Birla Institute of Technology graduate who earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Massachusetts, "spent 10 years with GE, the first six in India managing the company's ultrasound products made in a joint venture with Wipro. Then he ran GE's CT scan business out of Milwaukee."
"When Azim Premji, chairman of family-controlled Wipro, asked him in 1999 to take the reins and turn the company into a major player in the booming offshoring industry, Paul could not resist the challenge," says the article.
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