Imperialism Deja-vu

It has been exactly three months for me in my job and I would say that past three months were literally spend only on discussing job scenarios. Such discussions often start with problems of our respective divisions of company, it then inadvertently moves towards company's business model and finally ends up at a divided vote with few considering it as a niche player which would grow to great sizes while others (the group of which I am always the part) consider it as a wrongly positioned company and think that it would stagnate if not fall. Since this discussion had been going on since the second week of my joining, hence subsequently the timelines for discussions have been cut down. So in initial days I remember we use to discuss it for whole day and continue it till 2 am in the morning, but now this discussion raps up within an hour but you need something else to cut down one disussion. This "thing" often is the citation of someone from our batch ,who is working in some other company, regarding his/her work. The fact that others are equally unhappy (and for all those who do say that they are happy, we assume that they are pretending to be happy or are plainly lying) comforts us. Already discussed our companies business model, we then discuss the business model of other service industry companies, how would have they started, how easy it would have been to start one (it is always easy to mark anything easy particualry when you know that you do not have to do it) and how lame the americans/Europeans are and what not. This kind of discussion is the only thing which is left in our lives but occassionally very intersting things are bought out of this which are larger than our jobs or even these discussions. Yesterday while having a similar kind of discussion one point which came up was that India is the backoffice of world and is doing all the low end jobs that the developed world has in offering.I thought I should probe this till the depth.
The service industry had in recent time became the backbone of India's growth story, bought employment to large section of youths and placed money in the pockets of earlier empty pocketed population. We Indians took pride in this and sait that we are the efficient bunch of people who charge less and that is the reason that every company is coming to india. But essentially the thing is that every company brings down its non-critical rigorous work , to india. They would not share anything which they consider even of minutest of the critacility, with their service provider, no matter even if they have ownership stakes in the company. So essentially what India is doing, produce the data/reports/software codes/analysis cheaply which is later plugged into a bigger thing and is sold/traded or simply valued at much higher price. Let us compare this with the scenario in 16-17th century when the era of colonialism started. What did these imperialist countries do, they essentially hunted for cheap raw materials like cotton (the commodity which attracted britishers and French to India), got them cheaply, send it out to their factories in Europe, produce textile or other product from it and sell it at high price. That time too it was a lucrative deal in the beginning as the farmers could sell their crops (the idea of cash crop was introduced) and have some cash in their hands. Later things moved to exploitative levels and in the end we knew what shape it finally turned into.
With few assumptions, I think everything fits in here very well with present service industry. The cotton is replaced by engineers and other professional, who initially started working for the backoffice jobs as some routine jobs but with the cut throat competition and price/turnaround time being the key performance attribute(quality has never been an attribute for KPO/BPO and other backoffices which do call them by many fancy names), the working hours have been lengthened and go well beyond the permissible hours. Earlier the imperialists were the countries but now it is the companies which acts like them, so they fight amongst themselves to gain the best talent (whose work/payout ratio is maximum). So 10-12 hours of working (its not on your will rather is mandatory) has become normal, something which appears alien to our earlier generations (to whome salaries also appear alien). So there are air-conditioned sweat-shops lined up across our country having its major centres in Banglore, Mumbai and Gurgoan and an emerging destination Chennai. I do not know where this all will lead to but one thing is for sure, the aggressive pricing of the services which the indian entrepreneurs have engaged in just for getting start, had raised the payout bars quiet low and this is plummeting every now and then when a new company is started to cater same services. So earlier if a BPO x was billing a client 50USD/hr, new BPO y would try to capture market by offering 40USD/hr to same client and it can do that because owner knows that in india the best of the educated people are ready to work at one-tenth of this cost so one can afford this.Although I am no socialist but believe that if some restrictions are not imposed on this aggressive price war, the days of slavery would be back and this time it would be through very own indian Entrepreneurs who service the imperialists (US and European giants)