India Outsourcing Education

I saw the following on PBS show Nightly Business Report. I found it on their website and this post is linked to the article. In case they take down the page I am copying and pasting it below:

SUZANNE PRATT: India's large pool of inexpensive, English-speaking labor has fueled an explosion in business services outsourced to that country. Customer service call centers used to be the emblem of India's outsourcing boom. But these days, the sector is growing in new and surprising directions. Tonight, Darren Gersh wraps up our series, "India's promise" with a look at how India is beginning to challenge the limits of what can be done remotely.
DARREN GERSH, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: On a rainy Sunday morning, 17 year old Austin Cohen likes to relax at home by playing his guitar. After that, he might settle in at the computer and get a little help with his homework from halfway around the world.
VEENA KESHAV, MATH TUTOR: Hello, Austin?
GERSH: Ten time zones away from Austin's home in Virginia, Veena Keshav fields math questions from her home in Bangalore.
AUSTIN COHEN, STUDENT: Don't you take out two twos and multiply the other two and then multiply the other two?
KESHAV: This part is right.
GERSH: They use conferencing software to share the same screen over the Internet. But to protect Austin's privacy, there's no video. Tutoring Americans at night allows Veena to spend time during the day with her newborn baby. She's also enjoying learning American slang.
KESHAV: Cool, awesome and all that.
GERSH: And Veena gets to know students in a country she will most likely never be able to visit.
KESHAV: They are very enthusiastic, they are outgoing. They are not, like, shy.
GERSH: Are they good students?
KESHAV: Most of them are.
GERSH: Austin likes working online because he doesn't have to travel to a tutor and it's almost like playing a video game. Kind of cool using the Internet like this?
COHEN: Yeah, I think it's great. It saves me the embarrassment of facing the person if I get the problem wrong, also. I mean, the guy's half a world away.
GERSH: Veena's actually a woman.
COHEN: Oh. In general.
GERSH: Veena works for Tutor Vista. Company founder Krishnan Ganesh was looking for opportunities to start a business providing offshore services in health care or education. Then he saw this cartoon of an American father telling his daughter, "no, you may not outsource your homework to India." So, you were inspired by this? So, almost literally, this company began as a joke.
KRISHNAN GANESH, FOUNDER, TUTORVISTA: As a joke, yeah, yeah.
GERSH: It's not just tutors in India who are using this system. Tutor Vista is hiring people in Mexico to teach Spanish. Tutors in Hong Kong might chat with students in Houston in Mandarin. It's a new global delivery system for education. Economists say this wasn't supposed to happen -- jobs providing face to face services would never be off shored. But as Internet phone calls and video-conferencing get better, Indian entrepreneurs are transforming tutoring from a $60 an hour service to something more like a $99-a-month cable bill. Austin gets unlimited help and never has to leave the house.
COHEN: I get to sit here and drink my coffee while taking tutoring classes. It doesn't get more comfortable than that.
GERSH: And as technology improves and bandwidth expands, Ganesh expects more face-to- face, business-to-consumer services will be provided like this.
GANESH: Counseling, nutrition, dietitian service, anything that you want. You should be able to get it at an affordable cost from somewhere in the world. Somewhere in the world, somebody has got broadband Internet (INAUDIBLE) that service and is willing to provide that service from the comfort of their home.
GERSH: Instead of face-to-face, analysts now say physical presence is the limiting factor when it comes to off shoring. But even that may be changing. At Indian IT giant Infosys, software engineers are experimenting with a tracking technology called radio frequency identification or RFID for short. Using a cheap silicon chip, it's now possible for someone in Bangalore to take inventory for a store in Boston. Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani says RFID will make corporate supply chains much more efficient.
NANDAN NILEKANI, CEO, INFOSYS: So the fact that you can trace things through the entire life cycle at a very minute, granular level opens up a lot of opportunities, both in optimizing the supply chain while you make it, while you sell it and while it's being used.
GERSH: And Nilekani says the uses of technology are limited only by imagination.
NILEKANI: And it's important to imagine looking at the trends. It's to be able to say, the way technology is moving today, five years from now, this will be so powerful or this will be so cheap or this will be so fast. And, therefore, is there something that we can do five years from now using the power of this which we can't do today?
GERSH: Does this mean more American jobs are headed for places like India? Yes. But Ganesh says new American jobs will also be created.
GANESH: Just as it creates opportunities for people in some other parts of the world, it creates opportunities for people in the U.S. to service other parts of the world.
GERSH: And, oh yes, Tutor Vista and many of the other off shoring shops in India, they're owned by American investors. That is a comforting thought, unless you happen to be a math tutor. Darren Gersh, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Bangalore.
KANGAS: Monday, our "India's Promise" coverage continues with an NBR special edition, as the markets are closed for Memorial Day.