My own take on the Indian economic boom in information technology is that it represents a form of neo-colonialist, "now neo-liberal", exploitation of the huge “standing reserve” (Heidegger) of the available talented engineers in Indian society, who earn a fraction of their counterparts in the West.  While there maybe some trickle down to a portion of the non-participatory population from the information economy, the overall the quality of life conditions for the teeming masses of India's underprivileged is almost unaffected. I believe a parallel can be made between certain aspects of the colonialist economy of the British Raj when a certain sector of the Indian population, namely the civil service class, benefited from the foreign occupation, while the overwhelming members of Indian society suffered exploitation as a result of the occupation. Well switch the East Indian Company for Microsoft and the House of Lords for the “Virtual Class” and the current economic reality begin to make sense in historical perspective.  While to be sure the Indian economy e.g. GDP is growing at 8% and a certain sector of the Indian middle class is really benefiting from the global “will to technology” on the other hand GDP is by no means accurate measure of improvement in quality of life for the population and the vast majority of the Indian population are not high tech engineers or call center workers.

The following passage from Planet of Slums by Mike Davis puts the high tech boom in the highest tech center in India, namely Bangalore (known in India as the garden city) in stark perspective:

As the headquarters of India’s software and computer service industry As well as a major center for the manufacturer of military aircraft, Bagalore (population 6 million) prides itself on a California-style shopping malls, golf courses, nouvelle cuisine restaurants, five star hotels, and English-language cinemas. Dozens of tach campuses display logos for Oracle, Intel, Dell, and Macromedia (now Adobe) and local universities and technical institutes graduate 40,000 skilled workers and engineers each year. Bangalore advertises itself as a “prosperous garden city” and its southern suburbs are indeed a middle class Shangrila. Meanwhile, draconian urban renewal programs have driven the underprivileged residents from the center to the slum periphery, where they live side by side with the poor migrants from the country side. An estimated 2 million poor people, many of them scorned members of the scheduled castes, squat in 1000 or so fetid slums, mostly on government owned land. Slums have grown twice as fast

As the general population, and researches have characterized Bangalore’s periphery as “the dumping ground for those urban residents whose labor is wanted in the urban economy but whose visual presence should be reduced as much as possible. Half of Bangalore’s population lacks piped water, much less cappucciono, and there are more rag pickers and street children (90,000) than software geeks (60,000)

In an archipelago of 10 slums, researchers found only 19 latrines for 102,000 residents. Solomon Benjamin, a Bangalore based consultant for the UN and the World Bank, reports that “children suffered heavily from diarrhea and worm infestations, a high proportion were malnourished and infant mortality rates were much higher in the slums than in the state average…..Thus the granite, steel and the tinted glass offices in Bangalore, most of them belonging to software companies, pose a stark contrast to ill-maintained factories facing falling orders and tighter credit conditions. Ruefully, a leading Western economic consultant was forced to concede that “Bangalore’s high tech boom is a drop in the bucker in a sea of poverty".

Here is a description  of Arthur  Kroker  of the "Virtual Class"

The virtual class:

• is obsessed with technology.
• prevents critiques of technology.
• views digital technology as a source of salvation.
• has an impuse to nihilism, assuming that will to virtuality is will to good, so that the good is "the disintegration of experience into cybernetic interactivity."
• predatory capitalism and technological rationalizations for cost and deficit cutting. New form of ethics, an ethics of the virtual class -- predatory capitalism, restructuring, deficit cutting.
• projects its class interests into cyberspace.
• exerts absolute control over intellectual property.
• views the body as a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled.
• reduces human intelligence to a circulating medium of cybernetic exchange, i.e. a set of digital codes that can race around the internet. Destroys creativity and does not distinguish creativity from information.diminishes human experience. The virtualizers attempt to "disappear human subjectivity" by replacing the "data trash of experience" with "the war-machine of cyberspace." Note how the disappearance of the subject is a favorite post-modern theme