Does India hold the future of the Dutch knowledge society?
By Robin van Koert The government’s annual budget painted a gloomy picture of the Dutch economy. Earlier on, the minister of Social Affairs, De Geus, hinted he is concerned about the labor market. ‘In ten years time, two million people will be insufficiently qualified’, he predicted. A knowledge economy is the future for the Netherlands. The question is whether he overlooked a development. Offshore outsourcing. Low skilled jobs may be disappearing, but their destination is not India. Baan, Getronics, Philips and Shell, to name a few, outsource software development and maintenance to India, which is work for skilled programmers. The banks ABN Amro and ING conduct administrative work in India, which are not low skilled jobs either. Until now only a few thousand jobs have left. However, the expectation is that tens of thousands of positions will follow in the coming years. In October, ABN Amro announced the departure of thousands of jobs. The majority of those will go to India. Mostly it
