Gurujot Singh Khalsa :Sultan of Outsourcing and Off-shoring

By
Khuswant Singh

Taking Offshoring to Pakistan, South Africa & Beyond

‘So how did you reach South Africa?’ I asked. ‘We are simply driven by the formula that private enterprise plays a pivotal role in eradicating poverty and unemployment. It also saves exploitation of the environment as people get empowered.’ Highly impressed with Nelson Mandela, Gurujot wanted to help him by contributing his bit. Soon the World Bank, after conducting a feasibility report, approached Gurujot for South Africa. ‘Though we went there, work in South Africa is slow, because of the transformation that is taking place in South Africa. The power has already been transferred to the blacks but ninety-five percent of the wealth is still with the whites; slowly but surely there is a transfer of wealth taking place, where we fitted in perfectly. The process is happening in a regulated manner, unlike in Zimbabwe. However, with this process going on, it became difficult for us to find funding, as everything and anything requires funding in South Africa. As a result of which, the capital that we were looking for was not available. All the capital is being used for real asset wealth, whereas we were talking about venture funds. For example, the capital is being spent in transferring diamond mines from white ownership to black. We told the World Bank that things were not working in South Africa, at least for the time being, after which the World Bank suggested Pakistan.’

Gurujot and Co. were introduced to one Adeel Shah in Washington DC, who was head of the Pakistan-US business council, who took them to Pakistan where they held a meeting with UBL Bank, the leading investment bank. ‘Between UBL ($2 million, Rupali group ($2 million), and two smaller banks ($500,000), World Bridge connect raised investments worth five million US dollars. A facility with a four hundred seating capacity was set up in Lahore and Fortune 500 Company Dish Network became the first company to off-shore forty revenue seats in Lahore.

Women form a big part of our workforce, even though Pakistan is more conservative than India. Similar to Bangalore, we started plying company buses to pick and drop our employees. The buses have the company name in bold fonts so that people know where the women are going. Pakistan is what India was ten years ago. ‘But let me tell you,’ Gurujot warns, that if India does not take stock of the situation—serious issues like handling its attrition rate and quality—there could be tough times ahead. ‘See, the perception about India ten years ago is what it is in Pakistan. But today nobody thinks about perceptions, the concern is of quality, as you can hardly get good work in India. And companies today want to diversify their location risk.

Today, companies are sending seventy percent of their work to India but they do not want to put too much risk in a single location. They might as well have multiple countries. And mind you, experimenting in another country is no big deal. Just give twenty seats for starters. For example, the companies have hundreds of millions of dollars in India and if something were to go wrong, where can they take it? Only to America—and that would cost them twice as much. So to mitigate the location risk they have to spread themselves across countries.’

China is out, for they don’t speak English and according to Gurujot, it will take the Chinese at least twenty-five years to become accent neutral. ‘The best accent-free English in India is spoken in north India, though we faced huge challenges and made huge investments in training accents.

We hired speech pathologists, trained in accents, which is a science. There are eight diphthongs or sounds made by your articulators: the tongue, lips, teeth and the palette. These four interact in a particular way to form your or my accent. Indians made certain diphthongs which Americans never made. When we trained people in western accents, the idea was not to hide the fact that they were from another country but to train them to diphthongs that the Americans could understand. We were looking for more global accents, not American, or anything that would make the dialogue comfortable. It’s a very simple process and takes about forty hours to train someone. But one of the other problems was that Indians speak very fast whereas Americans speak slowly in syllables.’

Time was running out, for I had an evening flight to catch to New York. ‘India has to be very careful because it’s getting trapped in a vicious cycle. Companies are not training executives because attrition rate is high and global companies are not giving work because quality is sub-standard,’ Gurujot continued, after a business call interrupted our conversation.

‘By the way, what time is your flight?’ asked Gurujot. ‘In three hours time,’ I said. ‘Let’s hurry then. We’ll have dinner and I’ll drop you.’ ‘The next big focus is on stem cell research. And India seems to be the right destination to off-shore research. America is just caught up in an unnecessary debate of morality,’ he added as we chatted over dinner at an Italian restaurant. ‘People only think that you are a genius when they look back at your work, but what you are actually doing at that point of time is simply using common sense,’ he said as we ended our meeting.

Gurujot Singh Khalsa with his wife

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Khushwant Singh

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