Working With India

Globalization requires effective international and cross-cultural collaboration. When project teams from Western cultures first come into contact with colleagues from the Indian IT and BPO industry, prejudices against the new and unknown are typically amplified. This book is a start on the journey of cultural appreciation for managers, project leaders, and offshore coordinators working together with Indians. It is also a resource for business managers and company strategists seeking to understand the softer aspects behind the headlines that the Indian IT and BPO industry so frequently creates. Being both academically well researched and an account of the author’s many years of personal experience in India, the book opens with a description of cultural dimensions that help to break down culturally driven matters. It provides background information about India as a country and a social system. Examining the development and current status of India’s IT and BPO industry, it moves on to describe the dynamics of its workforce. The book then provides practical information on how to communicate, negotiate, and interact with Indian colleagues, and intelligently utilize expatriates. It closes by formulating recommendations for a more effective collaboration.

As well as being a fascinating country, with a rich and varied culture, India is emerging as a major world economy. More and more people are going there to live and work. The purpose of this book is to ease the transition between western and Indian cultures. If you are going to India to do business or for long-term employment, or are being relocated there by your company, this book will tell you all you need to know to help you and your family settle quickly into your new environment - and to ensure that it is the experience of a lifetime.Beginning with an overview of the history of India, its geographical divisions, political system, religions, languages and ethnic and cultural divisions, this comprehensive guide goes on to provide detailed information on: how to get a work permit and find a job; Indian work practices, employment rights and benefits; taxes and pensions; the Indian health care system; how to set up a business and set up a company; how to buy or rent a property; what the cost of living is like; how to open a bank account and obtain a credit card; expatriate and Indian lifestyles; entertainment and leisure in India; Indian customs and habits food - the regional variations and local delicacies; and raising and educating your children.

Everybody who is interested in working in India now has a resource to their make life easier. Knowledge Must's new guide book 'Work in India' is an in-depth resource featuring authoritative information on all important aspects of working as a foreigner in India. In this time of increasingly competitive labour markets, people all around the world look for challenging job opportunities beyond their home countries. India has emerged as one of the cultural and economic hotspots of the 21st century, and has developed into a major competence centre in fields as varied as IT, engineering, and the entertainment industry. "I have a good French diploma," says political science student Barbara Vassou, "but still, it is not easy to find a suitable job for me in France and I don't want to live in a 15 square metre box in Paris anymore after six years of hard studies. In India, as a young professional, my life is much more comfortable and more exciting, too. All the information I need about how to organise my life in India is covered in this guide!" Knowledge Must invites everybody to take a chance to experience one of the most captivating societies in our globalising world and witness one of the oldest, and at the same time most forward-looking, cultures. "In India you can find lots of employment opportunities in fields as varied as IT, media, and development work. However, you need to be prepared to immerse yourself in the complex Indian culture to ensure your personal and professional satisfaction", states author Daniel Ratheiser. Life for foreigners joining the Indian labour market will be so much easier once they figured out the Indian cultural environment. In addition to answering the most pressing questions, the guide features valuable insights ranging from logistics such as visa procedures and accommodation arrangements to cultural background information and inspiration for how to spend one's leisure time. This publication guides readers to a deeply satisfying experience when coming to India for work.

This study investigates Indian working women's sense of the discourses surrounding work and careers. In interviews conducted with seventy-seven women across socioeconomic statuses, castes, classes, and occupational and generational categories in the city of Pune, India, women express how feeling bound by tradition confronts excitement about ongoing changes in the country. The work lives of these women are influenced symbiotically by India's sociocultural practices and the contemporary phenomenon of globalization. Using feminist standpoint theory as a theoretical lens, Suchitra Shenoy-Packer explores how women deconstruct, coconstruct, and reconstruct systems of knowledge about their worlds of work as embedded within and influenced by the intersections of society, socialization, and individual agency. The meanings that Indian women associate with their work as well as their definition of a career in twenty-first-century India will be of interest to students and scholars of feminist theory, women's studies, globalization, Asian studies, and labor studies.

Much about India's economy and aid flows has changed in the last two decades. India's growth rate has quickened since economic liberalisation, the poverty head count has fallen and the volume and composition of its aid have changed as new issues of climate change and the environment have emerged.. Yet Does Aid Work in India?, first published in 1990, remains of great interest as a study of aid effectiveness in India's pre-liberalisation era. It identifies those sectors where aid-funded interventions succeeded, and where they failed. It explains how India avoided problems of aid dependence, and managed the political tensions that are associated with aid policy dialogue. More generally, it contains a useful commentary on and criticism of donors' aid evaluation procedures at that time and it highlights donor efforts in the difficult area of institution building. Despite the passage of time, many of the insights from India's earlier experience remain highly relevant to key issues of development assistance today.

This book showcases issues of work and employment in contemporary India through a critical lens, serving as a systematic, scholarly and rigorous resource which provides an alternate view to the glowing metanarrative of the subcontinent’s ongoing economic growth in today’s globalized world. Critical approaches ensure that divergent and marginalized voices are highlighted, promoting a more measured perspective of entrenched standpoints. In casting social reality differently, a quest for solutions that reshape current dynamics is triggered. The volume spans five thematic areas, subsuming a range of economic sectors. India is a pre-eminent destination for offshoring, underscoring the relevance of global production networks (Theme 1). Yet, the creation of jobs has not transformed employment patterns in the country but rather accentuated informalization and casualization (Theme 2). Indeed, even India’s ICT-related sectors, perceived as mascots of modernity and vehicles for upward mobility, raise questions about the extent of social upgrading (Theme 3). Nonetheless, these various developments have not been accompanied by collective action – instead, there is growing evidence of diminished pluralistic employment relations strategies (Theme 4). Emergent concerns about work and employment such as gestational surrogacy and expatriate experiences attest to the evolving complexities associated with offshoring (Theme 5).