The India Advantage

India has today become the haven for outsourcing corporations abroad for more reasons than meets the eyes. In the past, the Indian software engineers enjoyed the patronage of Information Technology giants at par with international peers as their in-house technology experts. With the availability of skilled and quality man-power available with the growing economies, corporations and companies started looking to offload work to other companies who had the expertise and infrastructure to take up such offloaded work to concentrate on their core business and to be ahead of competitors with newer technologies. Quality of work was the sole criterion.

The Outsourcing Trend

This trend continued for a while, but tough competition got the better of outsourcing corporations. The only way to stay ahead amidst tough competition was to cut costs. Thus started the hunt for newer but more cost-effective outsourcing partners. India was obviously one of major candidates. First it was the top three industry giants in India.

The changing Trend

The competition got tougher by day and the Information Technology leaders decided to leverage on the highly qualitative and skilled resources abundantly available in India through other lesser software solution providers who offered both quality and cost saving. With more and more corporations offloading development work to Indian companies, the demand for software engineers increased. More and more students took to technology and software. To boost technological development and to flourish outsourcing business in India, the Government of India has introduced special policies, set up infrastructure and offers incentives to the IT companies. India today enjoys a very strong brand equity in major markets, thanks to its growing and globally competitive software industry.

The Growing Resource

Every year, approximately 19 million students are enrolled in high schools and 10 million students in pre-graduate degree courses across India. Moreover, 2.1 million graduates and 0.3 million post-graduates pass out of India's non-engineering colleges. While 2.5-3 percent of them find jobs in other fields or pursue further studies abroad, the rest opt for employment in the IT industry. If the flow from high schools to graduate courses increases even marginally, there will be a massive increase in the number of skilled workers available to the industry. Even at current rates, there will approximately be 17 million people available to the IT industry by 2008.