Go East, Young Hi-Tech Worker

Considering India as Land of Opportunity for Westerners

By Siddarth Srivastava, Pacific News Service

NEW DELHI - August 24, 2004 - During the dot.com boom a few years ago, India mourned the loss of its best and brightest to the West. Now, Indian headhunters are talking of foreigners -- Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Filipinos and just about any other citizen of the world-- coming to India looking for employment.

While there are over 1 million illegal immigrants working in India, mostly from the subcontinent such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, engaging in low-end menial jobs, the number of legal foreign nationals working in India has risen to over 50,000 and growing. While the number is still small, consider this: Last year, around this time, there were less than 25,000.

Suddenly, the land of snake-charmers is full of opportunity.

Even Eng, a Norwegian, is working for call center Technovate as team leader. Miki Chiba, a Japanese, is executive of sales for Infosys, India's software giant. Magdalena Gazewska is a marketing executive, for Siri Technologies who hails from Poland. Paul King and David Eddison, both British, are trainers at Infotech. And Patrick Schapper is a travel consultant from Switzerland. These, and many more, are some of the newest faces to India, looking for opportunities.

As can be expected, the first off the block to actively seek out foreign workers are the nimble call centers whose mantra is: people from every part of the world for any part of the world. Several Indian call centers are offering multi-lingual services requiring foreign staff to man the operations as well as customer interface. Business and Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies such as Wipro Spectramind, HCL Technologies are hiring Norwegian, Swedish, Swiss, Dutch and Finnish nationals to handle the language barriers as well as provide specific cultural inputs in dealing with clients.

However, the story goes beyond just a replication of low-end hands at work at call centers. Experts say that foreign manpower, apart from facing job-losses at home, is moving out to India for the opportunities. As many leading global technology firms have moved high profile and skilled jobs here, India has beome an attractive destination.

Prominent headhunters here say that there has been an increase of top and middle level executives from the US and UK, exploring job opportunities in top technology firms. This is apart from regular middle and top-level management positions in multinational companies such as IBM, GE that have set up huge operations here.

``Lot of foreign nationals are looking at mid-level and senior level positions in India. Every week, we get at least one well qualified foreigner looking for a job here,'' says Kris Lakshmikanth, founder CEO and managing director of executive recruiting firm Head Hunters (India). ``As several IT product firms are setting up shop in India, experienced professionals from the US are also on the lookout for jobs here and the trend is being witnessed by the top tier recruitment firms," he says.

``Earlier, only call-center jobs were being outsourced to India,'' says Anil Mahajan, executive director of Talent Hunt Private Ltd, ``but now as companies start to ship high-end research and senior managerial jobs to India, foreign workers see a huge opportunity for themselves here.''

``Till a few months back, we were getting regular job queries from expatriate Indians who wanted to move back to India. But we were also taken by surprise when overseas professionals from countries as far as the US, Britain and South Africa also started to call us up to inquire about job opportunities here. This has now become a trend,'' says Mahajan.

John Winchester is one such professional who has recently shifted from the US to India as vice-president, engineering for the Indore-based Impetus Technologies. Prior to this, Winchester was working with NightFire Software, now merged with NeuStar Inc. "Even as my company got taken over I was ready for a change," he says. "I approached Impetus who was my client earlier as I was impressed by all the energy in the company on my visits to India. Several of my friends in the US would be equally interested in coming here. Mid-career IT professionals are looking out."

``Everyone talks about globalization left and right," says Joshua Bornstein, 23, who quit his job in an investment banking firm in Los Angeles to join Infosys in Bangalore as a manager of corporate affairs. ``India is [where] the world is moving to," he observes.

Other Readings of Interest

• Outsourcing Blues- Training My Overseas Replacement
  By Body Taing, PNS
  July 2004 - A young assemblyline worker in Silicon Valley tells of the arrival of Chinese workers at his company, and the reaction of a workforce fearful, resentful and in some cases apathetic about impending layoffs.
• Hello, Who's There? On Hold with a Call Center in India
  By Sandip Roy, PNS
  Spring 2004 - An Indian immigrant to the United States calls for software support and knows that "Joe" is likely "Jagdeesh," 8,000 miles and many memories away in the land of the author's youth. Does Joe-Jagdeesh know what a political hot potato he's become in America?

Srivastava (srivastava_siddharth@hotmail.com) is a New Delhi-based journalist.