Indian IT graduates find California land of plenty

By ADAM GIFFORD

The reason for India's success in pumping out computer engineers on to the world market - 130,000 a year - is pretty simple, says one of those who helped fuel the phenomenon.

"It's the California gold rush," said Sowmya Sadagopan, founder director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology at Bangalore.

"The fact is there is hardly any growth in India so there are no jobs for all the graduates, so they're forced to look outside.

"When they find they can go to the US and get a rewarding job at a great salary - with 40 rupees to the dollar making it even more attractive - it's like they've hit the jackpot.

"They tell people back home what a great place it is, and the momentum is created. An engineering degree is seen as the passport to the gold rush."

The figures would bear this out, with up to a third of Silicon Valley companies started by people from the subcontinent.

For some the route to the US is through postgraduate studies. Professor Sadagopan, who visited New Zealand recently, returned to India to teach after completing a doctorate at Indiana's Purdue University in 1979, but most of his classmates stayed on.

The other route is to graduate in India, get work at one of the local body shops, which cut code for companies around the world, and try to get a technical visa to work in the US.

Professor Sadagopan said a trickle of people were returning to India, either as entrepreneurs or as employees of multinationals.

"Sun Microsystems has set up a development centre with 500 people, 150 of them returning from the US," he said.

Professor Sadagopan said India's engineering schools took a mix of public and private students.

"There are entrance exams to get in, and most states regulate the colleges so they can't charge above about $NZ2500 a year in fees.

"However, they're allowed a 'management quota' for which they can charge what they want - usually about $25,000."

Professor Sadagopan, who has written textbooks on ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, said Indian firms were only now starting to install ERP software, at a time the market in other parts of the world had quietened.

That was in part because ERP vendors had brought their pricing down to make their software more attractive to medium-sized companies.

The market in India was dominated by German company SAP, which had between a third and a half of the ERP market.

"The Indian psyche wants two things," said Professor Sadagopan. "They want a name brand and they're also very save-the-skin oriented.

"They don't want to be told by the boss or by analysts or their friends they've made a mistake. SAP is seen as giving them perfection."

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