The India Bandwagon

It’s official. Every province/state and third world country is targeting India – except New Brunswick. Even those erstwhile Manitobans are getting in on the act. In the past few months, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, BC, Norway, Iceland, Brazil, even the US and the UK have developed ‘India’ strategies to attract investment and develop more trade.

But NB remains rather silent on this issue. This despite the fact that our own CBC reporter Jacques Poitras exposed the potential and the risk of India many moons ago.

Actually, somebody said that New Brunswick was leading a ‘delegation’ to India. I just never read about it or have seen anything to indicate any real interest (at least in the public domain).

Once again, I think we may have missed a big fat boat of an opportunity. India only started to emerge as a real powerhouse for IT and BPO 7-10 years ago and only in the last five has it really taken off.

New Brunswick could have been in there with joint ventures, shared call centres, technology transfer, call centre e-Learning/training, heck – we could have trained their call centre managers in our universities/communiy colleges. Beyond call centres, we could have attracted Indian IT workers to immigrate here. The large Indian IT and BPO firms that have invested billions in the UK, Ireland, eastern Europe and the USA could have spent a few pennies in New Brunswick. We could have blah, blah, blah.

Here’s a thought. Let’s send Poitras to eastern Europe. It’s the next opportunity. He can do an expose on ‘Bulgaria Calling’ and every other province will pick up on it and eventually so will New Brunswick.

Our own version of ‘trickle down’.