How we are democratising software
It all started in the early 2000s, a time when India’s IT sector was booming and cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad were being positioned as the next Silicon Valley. Politicians were celebrated as tech reformers, the term “IT superpower” was flung about with ease, and a new urban elite began to form around the promise of a digital future.
However, for some of us who had just graduated from college, the narrative did not sit right. Mine was the first batch to graduate from the Coorg Institute of Technology in Ponnampet, Karnataka, with a BE in telecommunication. Amid the celebration of software exports and outsourcing, the reality on the ground was starkly different: most of the jobs were in low-end service sectors — calling agents in business process outsourcing, application coding and maintenance work.
