I am from Australia - a country with very high labour costs. Some years back, I trialed outsourcing programming tasks to developers based in India, only to consistently receive shockingly bad quality work. Over the years, I have also helped clients fix up shoddy work written by such developers.

I will never forgot the moment I encountered this MySQL query from hell that brought a customer-facing webapp to its knees:

    select oldurl, newurl, id, dateadd from  jos_sh404sef_urls where newurl <> ""  AND oldurl not like '%vmchk%' AND newurl not like '%format=feed%' AND newurl not like '%format=pdf%' AND newurl not like '%print=1%' AND oldurl not like '%__404__%' AND (  soundex(oldurl) = soundex('not_found') OR  oldurl like '%not%' OR  oldurl like '%found%') GROUP BY oldurl limit 500;

Other developers I have engaged from other places, especially ex-Soviet countries, were far more competent and seemed to care about a job well done.

In my view, the Indian government needs to encourage its industry and educational institutions to study the teachings of W. Edwards Deming to instill a culture of quality. Back in the 1950s, Japan was ridiculed for the quality of its manufactured goods and within a decade after embracing Deming's advice, they became known for their excellence. Perhaps India can also experience such a renaissance.