TOKYO —

Thanks to its rapidly growing economy, India has been emerging in the global business arena. Especially, its IT industry has contributed to Western economies as an outsourcing destination, making use of its position as an English-speaking country with a massive engineering labor pool. Now, India is looking at the rest of Asia, especially Japan, as a potential business partner.

The Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC) was established in 1907, representing the interests of business and industry in India.

Heading up the IMC’s Information Technology Committee is Chairman Vijay Mukhi. Born in Bombay, he started his career as a freelance IT writer for newspapers in India after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in engineering from college. In 1987, he founded his own company, Vijay Mukhi’s Computing Institute. Now he provides e-security consulting services in India as well as publishing IT books through a partner company in Japan, InnoSoft Japan. He has been chairman of the IT Committee since 2001.

Japan Today reporter Taro Fujimoto visits Mukhi during a visit to Japan to hear more about his perspective on the IT relationship between India and Japan.

What is the Indian Merchants’ Chamber?

The IMC is an India-based business organization that takes care of small companies in India to help their business. We don’t have any offices in Japan.

Why are you eager to expand business between Japan and India?

We Indians have been exclusively focusing on the West, America and Europe because we speak English and share cultures. However, we now have to look at the global perspective, especially the potential in Asia. Japan is Asia’s largest economy and the two countries have no negative history. I think Japan and India are natural allies.

Why not China, Russia or Brazil?

The relationship between Russia and India is a government-to-government one. Russia has never had private enterprises. We don’t have a history together and have just started the relationship. We see China as a competitor, not as a friend. China is still a communist country, and we have a bad past with them. Brazil is geographically very far away. For us, Japan is a democratic country like India and there is no bad history between us.

What do you want to realize for the IT industry between Japan and India?

Japan has good hardware and India has good software. We would like to exchange these competitive advantages. But if you carefully look at the current situation, the business scale between the two countries is very small actually. There’s not much happening between the two countries in this industry. Many Indian companies say there is no business opportunity in Japan. In an aging population, the Japanese younger generation don’t want to learn IT but software. There will be a shortage of programmers in Japan.

How is that possible?

There are not so many businesses with Japanese companies in the outsourcing area because of the language barrier. So we would like to teach Indian engineers the Japanese language so they can work with Japanese companies. The Japanese language is not that difficult to speak and understand, although writing is difficult. In some cities in India, there are enough people who can teach Indians Japanese. I don’t see any problems in educating human resources. Every Indian speaks two to three languages. If we speak Japanese, Japanese business people are very open to us.

Also, there is no high-end competition in the IT industry in Japan. Since my own company provides IT consulting services to Japanese companies and publishes IT books in Japan, we are highly aware of the necessity of Japanese language skills. Personally, I’ve been taking Japanese language lessons for doing business with Japanese companies.

Does the Indian government support Indian companies that want to start business in Japan?

Not really. The government did nothing for the IT industry in India. The industry grows by itself. Right now, we are seeing business potential in Japan.

What’s the reaction of Japanese companies?

It’s very positive. India is now a very fast growing economy, which Japan is realizing. We are now an IT superpower.

Japanese business organizations point out the tariff rate by the Indian government is high.

That was in the past. Not anymore. We are liberalizing the economy every year. India is now very, very open. India is a very different country from what it used to be two or three years ago.

Japanese companies request more development of infrastructure in India for business.

I think you have to look at it positively. Chinese and Korean companies are coming to India to develop infrastructure, but I don’t see Japanese companies doing that.

Do you have any requests to make to the Japanese government?

The government should encourage more Japanese business people to come to India. It also needs to ease visa issues for Indians.

What sort of issues do you currently face?

From an Indian viewpoint, we are doing business totally in English. But a large part of the world doesn’t speak English. So, again, we have to change if we wish to do business in non-English speaking countries like Japan.

What are your future goals?

Personally, I now have to learn more Japanese. Overall, there are stereotypes about Indians doing business in Japan, and that we have to change.

What’s your management style like?

I don’t have any specific work motto. As many multinational companies outsource in India on a large scale, hiring thousands of local staff, bosses have to be part of them to survive in business.

What’s a typical day for you?

I work at the office from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., having business meetings. At night, I research and write books.

How do you relax?

I travel abroad with my wife often.

For further information, visit: www.imcnet.org and www.e-chishiki.com/eng/

7 Comments

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  DeepAir65 at 02:23 PM JST - 30th May

  India is getting expensive to use - Indian companies are already outsourcing work to Chinese companies to keep costs down so why not just go straight to the Chinese companies?

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  joystick at 11:16 PM JST - 30th May

  India is getting expensive to use - Indian companies are already outsourcing work to Chinese companies to keep costs down so why not just go straight to the Chinese companies?

  I wonder who prevents from going straight to the Chinese companies...

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  Athletes at 02:38 PM JST - 31st May

  India is very good in software. However their service fee is getting more expensive. For system integration, I can hire Vietnamese IT specialist as one third of Indian prof salary. Viet is geologically closer too. Japan has many IT support, website design services in Dalian. Just a door step from Japan. I think it is a bit late for his market expansion. May be bio technology or nano technology future prospect is better than IT.

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  captainjohann at 03:05 PM JST - 31st May

  Sir, More than language skills, the Japanese like CLEANLINESS which our top 5 star hotels even donot exhibit.Japanese are not open about these things due to modesty. ofcourse infrastructure is another matter which everyone knows.

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  cleo at 03:13 PM JST - 31st May

  Not only IT - there seems to have been an influx in recent years of Indian people opening restaurants here. On the whole very good authentic (I think) food, very good service and they don't look at you funny if you ask for vegetarian. Way to go.

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  MichaelJP at 10:10 PM JST - 31st May

  I have worked extensively for almost a decade with Indian outsource developers as well as onshore developers here in Tokyo, and if Chairman Vijay Mukhi ever reads these comments, I would urge he seriously takes into the consideration the following advice:

  India's reputation for high-quality IT professionals was made by the extremely talented "old-school" developers who came onto the scene prior to the dominance of firms like Infosys and Wipro.

  That reputation is now being squandered by the increasing numbers of disastrously incompetent, poorly-trained outsource staff that have been flooding projects in recent years. Please, place more focus back on education and quality. India is trusted far more than possible competitors like China, so don't let a few big companies destroy that trust and reputation by chasing large profits regardless of the longer-term damage. Once reputation is lost, it is very hard to regain.

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  rajakumar at 03:41 PM JST - 12th June

  India's IT titans should copy more other global IT titans like google, microsoft,dell,hp and others.

  India must embrace fully intractive virtual openess in all fields to improve itself via its vast number of educated people.

  India's educated must be more globally interactive in virtual open global world ,with its global neignbours worldwide.

  Bigger friendships in trade and all other fields should first, be cyber forged by indian know how, to enhance India's potential.

  Vast parcels of knowledge need to be opened up, more and more via global open interactive virtualised communications.

  The global future is communications without communications breakdowns between humanity everywhere on planet.

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