For what was once a country that provided cheap labour to the western world, is now the leading choice as an "Outsourcing service destination". The evolution of India struck gold when it leaped ahead from a cost saving destination to a talent rich destination that propelled the growth of companies based in US.

It's estimated that more than one-third of the new IT development work for big U.S. companies is done overseas, with India as their biggest site. No wonder, that India is at the center of brewing a storm in America. With the exploding hiring in India, the jobless rate among U.S. software engineers has more than doubled to 4.6 per cent in three years. But the biggest cause of job losses has been the U.S. economic downturn. Leading companies like GE Medical Systems, Cummins, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft that are hiring in India say they aren't laying off any U.S. engineers. Instead, by augmenting their U.S. R&D teams with the 2,60,000 engineers pumped out by Indian schools each year, they can afford to throw many more brains at a task and speed up product launches, develop more prototypes and upgrade quality.

The optimism in the Indian youth today is awe-inspiring. Rhythm Tyagi, 22, a master's degree student at the new Indian Institute of Information Technology (the institute campus is wired for Wi-Fi and boasts classrooms with videoconferencing to beam sessions to 300 other colleges) in Bangalore says, "IT is driving India's boom, and we the younger generation can really deliver the country from poverty.

Corporate America no longer feels it can afford to ignore India. U.S. governments are using India to manage everything from accounting to their food-stamp programs. It is estimated, that there are more IT engineers in Bangalore (1, 50,000) than in the Silicon Valley California (1, 20,000).


Source: Business week, December 08, 2003

|