The global market at work

Bangalore resident Rachna Asirvatham has a 56K modem, a bookcase full of software manuals ... and a bunch of American clients.

Editor's note: Second in a series of reports on the offshoring of white-collar jobs, reported on location from India.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

April 6, 2004 | BANGALORE, India -- Rachna Asirvatham's favorite TV show is "Friends."

But her real idol is Oprah. Rachna admires the self-made billionaire not only for her stardom but also for her charity work. "Have you met her?" she asks me, as we drink Coke over a lunch of Chinese chicken noodles and chicken Manchurian.

Rachna and her colleague Jayanthi Ganesh and I are eating lunch in the dining area of a modest flat belonging to Rachna's parents in Bangalore. Over the kitchen door hang formal group photographic portraits of both sides of the family.

"Have you met any other celebrities?" the two young women press me.

A visitor from the land of the stars, some 13.5 hours back across the international dateline, I have a sorry paucity of celebrity-studded encounters to share. No, I haven't met Oprah. But I wonder what the TV talk-show host and her American audience would make of Rachna Asirvatham, an almost 25-year-old entrepreneur in Bangalore, who co-founded a small Web development company called Smart Webby when she was just 21.

What Rachna does is an example of the kind of work that is leaving the U.S. But the cheap labor that she sells is her own. The title on her business card reads "C.E.O."

Rachna lives in Bangalore with her mother, an advertising copywriter, and her father, a retired Navy serviceman who now heads up the local subsidiary of a Japanese firm. For fun, she plays basketball with her church youth group. She strives to tithe fully 10 percent of her income to local orphanages.

She makes her money selling Web development services to clients, mostly in the United States and Europe, at a fraction of what her first-world competitors command for such projects.

The most basic package Smart Webby offers is a 10-page Web site for $225. On one recent project, Rachna and her colleagues built a site for a company in Bethesda, Md., including Flash-animated graphics and a newsletter subscription setup, for just $380, in less than a week.

An American firm bid $9,750 for that same project, according to the client.

To put these fees in perspective, the lucrative starting salary for a "fresher" -- aka recent college grad -- working as a customer-service call-center worker in Bangalore is between 8,500 and 10,000 rupees a month. That's between about $190 and $220 U.S. dollars. Many of Rachna and Jayanthi's friends do those jobs. "They work late at night. We never get to see them. They have no social life," says Jayanthi, adding that many take buses an hour and half each way to work.

Rachna and Jayanthi discovered that if you're a college graduate with good English skills in Bangalore, you don't have to stay up until dawn making collection calls to Des Moines to make a place for yourself in the global economy. If, like Rachna and her co-founder Anita Sudhakar, your parents can afford to lend you the money to buy a computer, you can just outsource yourself.

That's because the multinationals like IBM, Yahoo and G.E. are not the only ones who are salivating over India's burgeoning pool of educated, skilled workers. Those companies are erecting air-conditioned, cubicled temples to Western capitalism all over Bangalore's third-world streets. But just as bargain hungry is the small-business man, armed with a Web connection and a credit card, who never understood why he had to shell out big bucks for a homepage in the first place.

Rachna sees the political furor in the United States over outsourcing to India this way: "It's sad if people lose their jobs. But we're just offering a good product for a price that's much cheaper. It's up to the customers." As with most outsourcing firms here, the majority of Smart Webby's clients are American.

Next page: Where does the money saved by using Smart Webby go?