If 2008 taught us one thing, it is that nothing is as contagious as fear and uncertainty. In 2009, fear and uncertainty stalk the Indian outsourcing industry,

This weekend former chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ramalinga Raju was taken into police custody at Chanchalguda prison in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad.

Satyam founder Raju, his brother, who was the managing director of the company, and the former chief financial officer are all being investigated on charges of corruption.

Raju admitted in his resignation letter that $1 billion on the company's books had been faked.

The Satyam scandal has involved those age-old business practices in the scramble for a piece of the action: cooking the books, turning a blind eye, back-handers and sweeteners, and executives cashing in from their inside knowledge.

Last September Satyam won an international award for corporate governance: no less than the Golden Peacock, awarded by the World Council for Corporate Governance. It seems now to have been a golden turkey.

It's worth reminding ourselves that the outsourcing industry has been the standard bearer for the new Indian economy, so corporate scandals are bad news for all types of business there.

In an earlier blog, I implied that it would be unusual for large-scale malpractice to be isolated to a single company or person – in any country or sector – as such behaviour lurks in boom-time industries as companies jostle for dominance, testing the limits of the law.

Alas, for the second time in as many weeks this blog may have been prescient. Wipro, another of India's trinity of services giants, has joined Satyam in being banned from doing business with the World Bank after it apparently offered shares in its IPO to the bank's employees. Wipro says it has not broken the law.

Another Indian IT services company, Megasoft has also been banned, in this case for a failed Chinese joint venture with a former World Bank employee.

The problem for India now is acute: we know from our own experience in the West that fear and uncertainty spread like a contagion, and often bring about the outcomes we are most afraid of.

Some commentators believe that corruption may spread in India rather than fall away, partly because of intensive competition as Western economies falter. If that happens, then it will impact on UK clients, who may think twice about their offshored programmes.

Of course, we face our own problems in the UK, Europe, and the US as the recession deepens and the UK's financial services sector seems to be falling like a house of cards.

In the UK's case, however, we have been the victim of our own success: we are a multi-talented people, and yet there is little diversity in an economy that is now almost entirely built on services in the image of the Thatcher years.

One wonders whether India will rue the day it followed that lead if its economy falls victim to the type of greed that typified the 'loadsamoney' 1980s.