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Technology Stocks : Satyam Infoway Ltd-(Nasdaq:SIFY) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (1115)	3/11/2000 1:19:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1471

OT New Delhi reaps benefits from IT brain drain The Straits Times (Singapore) Thursday, March 09, 2000 As hordes of new recruits head abroad, India fears a brain drain, but many who get wealthy plough their cash back into ventures at home NEW DELHI -Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai graduate Rakesh Mathur founded junglee.com with three other Indians and sold it to Amazon.com in 1998. He made US$ 90 million (S$ 153 million) from the deal. Mr Mathur gave US$ 1 million to his alma mater recently and started a new company called purpleyogi.com with offices in Mountain View, California -and Bangalore, India. He also bought a house in the city of Pune in the west of India and recently took a 25 per cent stake in a dot.com start-up, working out of a new incubator facility at IIT Mumbai. Mr Mathur is one of many Indians who move to the United States, often straight after graduating, for exciting and lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley. They make the transition from hired hand to entrepreneur in fertile, venture-capital and ideas-rich northern California. According to researchers, some 750 companies in Silicon Valley are run by Indians. They account for sales of more than US$ 3.5 billion and employ more than 16,000 people. According to some estimates, Indians comprise 40 per cent of the team of any software-development agency. Every year, about a third of the 115,000 H1B visas issued by US embassies worldwide go to Indian professionals. Many US companies -and not always software or Internet players -regularly raid the ranks of IIT and Indian Institute of Management (IIM) graduates every year. In one such exercise at IIM Bangalore last week, many of the top 181 graduates were snapped up by US, British and multinational firms. These ranged from India's Infosys Technologies to Citibank and the Mitchell Madison Group, a consultancy based in Britain. IT and related sectors accounted for well over 30 per cent of job offers at the IIMs and other top management-training institutes at their annual top graduate rollouts last week. A significant percentage of those graduates are headed overseas. The cumulative effect of the figures is astonishing and what was once considered a serious problem in terms of a "brain drain" for India is now revealing a silver lining as some successful Indian entrepreneurs plough the cash back into ventures at home. It helps that there is a dot.com boom in India, which, with China, is considered one of the mega-markets of the future. There is a scramble to get in on the ground floor in one of the fastest-moving industries of all time. Every day brings new headlines in business pages about dot.com investments and five of the six top companies in terms of market capitalisation on the Bombay Stock Exchange are IT- related. Notwithstanding the potential to get rich quickly, life is not always easy for the imported IT professionals in the US. "The IT revolution is occurring on the backs of these workers," Mr Pradeep Chaphalkar, a US green-card holder from India, told The New York Times last month. He is a spokesman for the Immigrants Support Network, an organisation of workers seeking permanent residency in the US. H1B visas have many restrictions that hamper career progression and options for change -a paradox in an industry in which technology changes every week. In an incident in January which shocked the overseas IT professional community, 40 Indian nationals working as contract computer programmers for the US Air Force were arrested at the Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, by agents of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS). There was an uproar over the arrests, in which the programmers, including women, were led away in handcuffs for alleged violations of their H1B rules. The INS agents reportedly also made racist remarks. The INS eventually dropped all charges against the programmers. But IT makes the world a smaller place. Even while Silicon Valley's position will clearly remain unchallenged for years to come, the tens of thousands of IT engineers that Indian universities and institutes churn out every year -the second biggest pool of English-speaking skilled workers after the US -will soon have many more choices at home than they did in the early 90s. Young and dynamic companies are going the stock-option route to attract talent. For the first time in India, it seems possible -if one is equipped for the job -to get rich in one generation in the service industry.