The abundance of well-educated and trained workforce, low operational costs, quality of work and a techie-friendly government have made India the most preferred IT outsourcing hub, the world over. Until the last few years, only IT enabled services like call centres, medical transcription and data entry were the only terms associated with outsourcing from India. But of late, Indian start-ups are being preferred by many foreign companies over native freelancers to outsource more technically demanding jobs like, engineering, software development and web development. As there are a multitude of start-ups vying for outsourcing work in web development, it is good to have a peripheral knowledge of the work culture in India. This is not intended to form a generalised opinion but to help you wisely choose the right company, if you are thinking of outsourcing web development work to India.
You may not be used to hearing complaints like “we did not have power for an hour”. But it is no surprise to the average Indian. Power outages varying from 10 minutes to an hour is not uncommon in average Indian cities, except for a few exceptions like the metros. So, when your offshore web development team says the work got delayed because there was no electricity, don’t think they’re taking you for a ride. Not all start-ups may have a backup generator.
Indians are very fond of festivals and holidays. According to a survey conducted by Mercer LLC in 2014 among 64 countries, India topped the list with 21 holidays as opposed to the UK, which came second last with only 8 days. The number of holidays vary from state to state as most of the 29 states have their own regional festivals and events. This is another factor you need to get used to, if you are about to outsource work from a web development company in India.
On the other hand, you cannot find skilled professionals with as much exposure to the latest technological developments as Indian techies have compared to other Asian countries. English literacy is also comparatively high in India and most of the young professionals are fluent English speakers. This means you can effortlessly communicate with them, which is most important of all, when working with a remote team. The quality consciousness of Indians is also remarkable. This does not mean their quality policy or company motto merely emphasises words like “Quality”, “Commitment”, Dedication” etc. The very fact that, at present, India has more ISO certified web development companies than any other country, proves this point.
India also has a very IT friendly government and the IT policies have been consistently attractive for companies looking to outsource work to India. The government of India is very encouraging and supporting when it comes to IT start-ups. So, naturally you get a highly competitive group of qualified and experienced personnel working on your projects. So, if you are willing to adapt to the few trivial issues I mentioned earlier, outsourcing your web development project to India, is going to be one of the best business decisions you ever made.