It?s not clear as to what author Chetan Bhagat has against Infosys founder chairman N R Narayana Murthy. His statement that Murthy runs a body shopping company is astonishing to say the least. It is difficult to understand the rationale behind such a comment and at first go it looked totally out of place, considering that the stature of the two men hardly match.

It all started when Murthy, while giving a speech in New York at the `Pan IIT Summit?, mentioned that the standard of students entering IITs had dropped. He attributed this to the kind of coaching classes taken up by IIT aspirants. Murthy?s comments looked perfectly legitimate to most. After all, he has employed several IIT-ians in his own firm. He himself is an IIT-ian.

But somehow, this did not go down well with Bhagat, who is an author popular in some quarters but widely criticised by the elite class of writers. His first book 5 Point Someone was a best seller and his other works like One Night @ the Call Centre and The 3 Mistakes of My Life did good business too. And he is an IIT-ian. That?s a good setting alright, but what does he have against Murthy?

For years, people who had an axe to grind with Murthy have used the term `body shopping? to define outsourced IT work. Wikipedia describes body shopping as the practice of consultancy firms recruiting information technology workers in order to contract their services out on short-term bases. ?…..body shopping is disparaged by those IT services companies in India that assert that they provide real services (such as software development) rather than the “sham” of merely farming out professionals to overseas companies,? Wikipedia states.

It?s a favourite term with some Americans to describe the kind of work that Indian IT services companies do. IT chieftains have always loathed the use of that term, and unless someone is a huge critic of the Indian IT system, no one puts it on the table. But Chetan Bhagat has.

Now let us look at some of the facts. The Indian IT services industry is worth $60 billion and carries with it the hopes of thousands of middle class IT workers. It is an industry which has single-handedly uplifted the fortunes of the aspirational youngster, making him a globe trotting individual confident of his stride. Narayana Murthy is in many ways the father of the Indian IT industry, who perfected the global delivery model. To him goes the credit for building up an industry from scratch and making it a formidable force.

In short, it was Murthy along with Premji, Shiv Nadar and the TCS leadership team, who put India on the global corporate map on a scale that threatened advanced economies. It was with the advent of IT that Corporate India could, arguably for the first time, compete on a global stage and win on a consistent basis.

To criticise and put down an industry which has offered handsome jobs to lakhs of people does not look a fair act. Bhagat must be having his own points of view, but he has probably over reacted. And he need not have taken personally a comment on IITs.

Earlier this year minister Jairam Ramesh was put in a corner for his comments on the quality of IIT faculty. He had said that IITs are good because of the quality of the students and not that of the faculty. This had caused a furore at the time, with the faculty reacting strongly.

But Bhagat?s comments have probably overlapped that incident. His comments mirror what Ramesh had to say about the students. It is clear that he does not believe that the quality of students has slid. But he could have put his point across in a much more subtle fashion. But a controversy always gets headlines, doesen?t it?