If a company tries to cut its costs and opts for a cheaper software vendor who uses low paid engineers and a technology glitch develops in its product, who is to blame? The vendor or the company? If a company uses software as a cost centre and not as a value creator, shouldn’t it be the one to take the blame?

News reports emanating from the West have tried to pin the blame on the ill fated Boeing 737 Max’s software glitches that led to two horrendous crashes killing 346 lives on Indian IT companies.

When the Lion Air flight crashed in Jakarta in October 2018, the preliminary findings pointed to a software problem. Subsequently when the Ethiopian Airline crashed in Addis Ababa in March 2019 the spotlight was firmly on a new software system called the Manoeuver Characteristics Augmentation System that Boeing had introduced in its 737 Max aircraft. MCAS was introduced to stop the jet’s nose from pointing too high.

Over 300 Boeing 737 Max aircraft from all over the world were grounded, causing untold losses to several airlines as well as stock losses for the American plane manufacturer.

Coincidentally, a couple of days later news reports began shifting the blame on to Indian companies to which Boeing had outsourced some of its software development. The mischievous headlines talked about $9 an hour programmers involved in the software of the aircraft.

Though Boeing itself clarified that it had not relied on Indian engineers for the MCAS or the cockpit warning light, which too was flawed, the damage has been done. Indian IT outsourcing has yet again been made a scapegoat. Cyient, one of the companies named in the reports, has refuted all allegations. While some Nasscom members have tweeted that the claims lack veracity, there has been no unified statement standing up for Indian companies or pointing out how we have moved up the value chain. That’s the need of the hour. Otherwise Indian IT outsourcing will never get out of this damaging low cost image rut it has got into.

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