Back to India?

"The top talent in India always has one foot in India and the other in Air-India"


IEEE Spectrum carried a news report today about the reverse brain drain - engineers going back to India. Apparently many venture capitalists are setting shop in India in the field of semiconductors and related fields since it is so damn cheap to operate in India. Apparently when Bill Gates visited Infosys, he was surprised by the fact that all the employees at Infy got their lunch at $0.40 - which was the actual cost of preparing the lunch. Even more astounding was the fact that the CEO Narayana Murthy got the same $0.40 lunch every day! I cannot buy even half a sandwich for 40 cents out here!

The maker of the Pentium Chip Vinod Dham has set up 5 venture capital funds in Bangalore, Intel has setup a new $25 million complex near the airport in Bangalore which employs 950 engineers and Sun has another huge complex in downtown bangalore. Almost all major technology firms are now housed in Bangalore (except Microsoft which has its research centre - only one of the two development centres it has outside the US - in Hyderabad) and I think that by the end of this decade Silicon Valley will refer to Bangalore, India.

One major Incentive? According to Spectrum, $7 million of venture capital in the United States is equivalent to $40 million in India. Now that should certainly register with every firm which is looking towards cost cutting. In any case, the employees are going to be the same Indian dudes.. whether they set up shop in San Jose or Bangalore!


Incidentally H1B seems to be a bad word nowadays. Check out the IEEE position on H1B, the H1B hall of shame and Feinstein's Rule!