India beckons

Business
Gurgaon and Bangalore preferred by American B-school students
By Saritha Rai

This summer, Omar Maldo-nado and Erik Simonsen, both students at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, did something different. Bypassing internship opportunities on Wall Street, they came to India to spend the summer at an outsourcing company in Gurgaon.

Getting a global feel: Interns from American B-schools on the Infosys campus in Bangalore

"The India opportunity grabbed me," said Maldonado, of Boston. "I wanted to get a global feel for investment banking and not just a Wall Street perspective." He and Simonsen are spending three months at Copal Partners, an outsourcing firm with 100 analysts. It produces merger and acquisition pitch books, provides equity and credit analysis and other research to global banks and consultant groups, including those on Wall Street.

Maldonado and Simonsen are part of a virtual invasion of India by American students. Graduate students from top schools in the US, most from master of business administration programmes, are vying for internships at India’s biggest private companies. For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice.

India is not just a line on an Ame-rican student’s resume, said Kiran Karnik, president of Nasscom, "but also culturally fulfilling". Many students travel while in India, giving them a view of the country and its long history, he said.

Nasscom is trying to track the ever-increasing number of foreign interns. Many are in India to study globalisation firsthand, said Karnik. This is often not possible in China, where unlike in India, English is not widely spoken. Karnik said he had met more than a dozen interns from the Harvard Business School who were in India this summer.

Elsewhere, too, the trend is on the rise. Four students from Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in North Carolina are interning in India; only one last year and none in 2003. Of this year’s interns, three are at Infosys Technologies, Bangalore, and the fourth is in Chennai at GlobalGiving, an organisation based in Maryland that helps support social, economic and environmental projects around the world.

"No longer is India thought of as a land of snake charmers and bride burnings," said D.C. Stanley D. Nollen, professor of international business at the Robert Emmett McDonough School of Business in Georgetown University, Washington DC. "Now India means the world’s best software services, and increasingly, pharmaceuticals and auto parts."

Nollen directs the school’s programmes for MBA students in India, which include ‘residencies’—academic courses that are centred on consulting projects for companies operating in India. In August, 49 students signed up with companies like Philips India Software and MindTree Consulting, both in Bangalore; the motorcycle-making unit of Eicher in Chennai, and ICICI Bank in Mumbai.

India can be a jolt to a first-time American visitor. In Gurgaon, a small town despite its tall office complexes and shiny new malls, Maldonado and Simonsen share an apartment where power fails several times a day. Temperatures are above 37 degrees Celsius in the summer.

They came prepared to find inadequate infrastructure, but were not prepared for the daily frustrations of Gurgaon. There is no mass transportation system, and shopping, even for something as basic as an umbrella, can take hours.

Infosys, the country’s second-largest outsourcing firm, after Tata Consultancy Services, discovered how popular India had become as an internship destination for Americans: for the 40 intern spots at its Bangalore headquarters, the company received 9,000 applications. Only those with a cumulative grade-point average of 3.6 or more made it to a short list, and then they were put through two rounds of interviews. The interns work in areas from marketing to technology.

Inroads to a new culture: Jason Rosenthal, summer intern at Infosys

Among the Infosys interns is Caton Burwell, 28, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "India has come to symbolise globalisation and I wanted to participate in the workings of the global economy," he said. "Besides, it would look great on my resume."

Jeffrey Anders, 29, from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, is similarly stirred. Anders is halfway through his internship at the business process outsourcing division of Hewlett-Packard India in Bangalore. "I can’t help but feel that I am witnessing the creation of a new global economic order, a new reality that most people back home don’t realise is coming," said Anders.

Meanwhile, Indian companies are looking at summer internships as a way of building a diverse work culture."Bringing investment bankers here provides our Indian team a perspective and context of Wall Street," said Joel Perlman, co-founder of Copal Partners, a company based in London that has four employees each in New York and London and a 100 in India.

Other companies, and even the schools themselves, are looking at internships as a step towards attracting bright young Americans to work in India. Infosys, for instance, hired Joshua Bornstein, a former intern from Claremont McKenna College in California, nearly two years ago as its first American employee based in India.

"In this increasingly global economy, we expect India to become an even greater source of employment for our students," said Sheryle Dirks, director of the Career Management Center at Fuqua. Reverse brain drain, you may call it.

Though you quoted from an article, you have evinced keen interest in coming back to Canada in many posts. Also you were sorry about losing your PR status. If everything is so good in India why come to Canada ? This question is not just for you.

The latest processing times are as follows

Buffalo , NY, USA - 27 months ( Used to be 12 months )
New Delhi , Indai ( 64 months , used to be 24 months )
China ( 80 + months )

Of course the time lines are approximate but are generally reflective of the reality. What does that mean....

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Non illigitamus carborundum