Implications of emerging technologies on the Indian information technology sector and beyond

Abstract

newline Most organizations within the Indian Information Technology (IT) sector are servicebased and known for delivering high-quality custom software (SW) and businessprocess management (BPM) services to clients worldwide. They primarily reliedon engineers produced by the Indian engineering colleges to deliver such services.A majority of these engineering colleges have little or no academic autonomy and have mushroomed in parallel to the growth of the Indian IT sector starting from the 1980s. Organizations within the Indian IT sector also built work structures that pushed engineers, irrespective of their specializations, to equip themselves with generic software programming and communication skills crucial for delivering SWBPM services. Today, these service-based IT companies and non-autonomous engineering colleges face a rapid rise of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Big Data, and so on. As the Indian IT sector gears up to provideemerging technology solutions to clients for their digital transformation needs, itis also causing a significant rise in demand for engineering talent skilled in thesenew-age technologies.The objective of this thesis is to shed light on the implications of emerging technologies on the Indian IT sector, its accompanying organizational field, i.e., the Indian Engineering education, and the social mobility prospects of engineers or prospective engineers, in general.