Is it time for India to call back the prodigals? The demand for competent IT pros is growing by leaps and bounds with more and more global majors entering the Indian arena to take advantage of its talented and comparatively cheaper labour force.

The accent now is no longer on the entry -level IT jobs but rather on more high-end ones which were so far being done mostly in the US. And all this means India is heading for a serious number crunch as far as IT talent is concerned. As for the Indian expats, many of them seem to have realised that that sometimes the best way to move up is to move back.

Over the last 50 years, millions of Indians left their homeland to seek riches abroad, from the United Arab Emirates to the United Kingdom to the United States. But since 1991, as the Indian economy opened up and foreign funds started pouring in, some expatriates have found that the best thing they can give back to their motherland is themselves.
As India has become the 'in' thing, more and more global IT companies are turning to India. IBM Inc. has also joined the Indian bandwagon. Last week, the global major announced the setting up a global business solution centre here to provide a range of services to its clients worldwide. According to a company statement, the centre will enable its consultants to develop and deploy solutions in about 50 business areas, including consumer driven supply chain optimisation, banking risk and compliance and retail merchandising.

The company is expected to invest about $200 million annually to develop, enhance and market the solutions globally. This means IBM is going to be on a hiring spree in India. \"The global centre will create a portfolio of replicable industry solutions, being developed by combining the skill sets of our business consulting, research, software, systems, engineering, and emerging technologies,\" said IBM India global delivery director Amitabh Ray.

The company employs about 39,000 people in the country, up 70% from 23,000 a year ago. That rate of growth should continue \"for quite some time,\" said Ray, talking to Paul McDougall of InformationWeek. At that rate, IBM will have at least 55,000 workers in India by next year. And the figure could easily pass 60,000--or 20% of its current worldwide workforce of 300,000.
Not only IBM, Oracle and Microsoft also plan to have 10,000-strong-workforces in India while Apple will hire 3,000 this year. And it is not only the foreign majors, the Indian MNCs are also hiring in large numbers. Infosys, India's second-largest IT outsourcer, added more than 3,200 employees in its most recent quarter. India's tech and business-process outsourcing industry will employ 1 million more people in 2010 than it does today, as it grows from $22 billion in revenue to $60 billion, predicts Nasscom India's National Association of Software and Service Companies and consulting firm McKinsey.

Betting on Indian talent

The IBM solutions will be built on its services oriented architecture methodology and in collaboration with its clients and business partners. The centre will also become a foundry for solutions, enabling IBM to deliver them to its global clients.

The Bangalore move will add a new dimension to IBM's presence in India so far. From mere code-jockeying, it will mean a step up to centralise work on one of its most strategic efforts--building SOA-based software systems that consultants can resell to customers in various industries. Talking to InformationWeek, Jeby Cherian, head of IBM's new Global Solutions Delivery Center in Bangalore said that all such developments are being moved to India.

Microsoft, Intel as well as Oracle are also planning on $1-billion investments each in India over the years. Where Are The Heads?

Every year, 400,000 engineering and computer science grads come out of Indian universities. But not all of them can be absorbed by the industry right away. According to Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, only a quarter \"are suitable on an as-is basis.\" As for the rest, either their technical skills are not up to the mark, or they have a poor command of English, or are unwilling to relocate to India's tech centers. Nasscom predicts a shortage of half a million IT workers by 2010.

So, in order to make it's Bangalore centre successful, IBM may have to lure back the Indian expatriates. Already some of them like Harish Grama, a VP in charge of IBM's India software lab, which works on WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, and other products, returned to India a little more than a year ago. IBM India strategy director Inderpreet Thukral also returned to India after over 12 years in Austin, Texas, and other IBM offices in the States.

Siddharth Purohit, moved from Dallas to Bangalore to be a chief architect at the Bangalore unit, one of IBM's key global development centers. Add to this the fact that top Indian honchos working for MNCs are now getting the same salaries whether they are in Delhi or Detrout, Mumbai or Manhattan! Baru Rao left Syntel to head Capgemini in Mumbai for an annual salary of over $400,000. In Chennai, Polaris hired Arup Gupta as president and COO from TCS US for $300,000 plus stock options .

Reliance Infocomm inducted a new president (applications ) paying him over $300,000, more than what he got in the US from Vodafone. Today, Bangalore alone has over 200 CXOs who get these kind of salaries. A mid-level Oracle executive , who draws $90,000, recently shifted base to Bangalore for the same salary. Another mid-level employee has moved to Chennai for 20% more than what he used to get in the US with an MNC.

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Speech by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times....

"When we were young kids growing up in America, we were told to eat our
vegetables at dinner and not leave them. Mothers said, 'think of the
starving children in India and finish the dinner.' And now I tell my
children: 'Finish your maths homework. Think of the children in India
who would make you starve, if you don't.'"