Bangalore-headquartered Infosys Technologies is among the few IT services providers to have access to India's top talent. The company hires the best brains from the campuses of reputed engineering colleges, including the premier IITs, across the country, but spends nearly Rs 750 crore (Rs 7.5 billion) to retrain them before they can work on live projects.

In an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra, Infosys [Get Quote] director & head, HRD, Education & Research, T V Mohandas Pai talks about the shortage of 'employable' talent and the need for proper training. Excerpts:

Training of freshers appears to have become a costly affair...

We have an education system that is not producing the kind of engineers that industry wants. Therefore when we hire people, we have to train them for a fairly long time. And that's why we have to set up these kinds of facilities (Infosys has a large training centre in Mysore).

Training a person for 16 weeks costs us about Rs 250,000 per person. We thus spend Rs 750 crore a year on educating and training our workforce. We are being forced to do what universities should have done.

To bring in certain reforms in the education system in the engineering colleges, we have launched a very large project called Campus Connect.

We are making large investment not to train people in these colleges, but to raise the standard of the students to a certain level so that they become more employable. We have connected 502 engineering colleges so far, and trained more than 2300 faculty members in these engineering colleges.

What about the training costs of your recruits in developed countries?

Training a person for 16 weeks (4 months) in the US costs something like $50,000 (around Rs 21.25 lakh). However, the education system is much better in the US. So we provide short-term training courses of about 15 days for new recruits there.

How would you like to rate the training provided by Infosys?

Our employees are highly-valued. When they go to other companies, they get paid more. About 4.5 per cent people who undergo training in our institutes fail to qualify because of our high standards. It is also due to the fact that we hire all engineers, not just IT engineers.

But still your attrition is almost on a par with the industry average...

Well, industry attrition may be about 16-17 per cent. Our attrition is about 13.7 per cent in the last 12 months till the last quarter, and of this, 1.5 per cent is involuntary attrition. Involuntary attrition means people who come for training, but failing to pass the grade.

Is involuntary attrition rising due to your focus on recruiting more freshers?

Normally, we rely on the campus recruitment to the extent of 55-60 per cent. Since trained people are not available in the industry, we hire people from the colleges, and train them.

Infosys has contributed more than 50,000 trained people to the country. These are the people who have joined us, trained by us, and now have left us to work elsewhere. We are 95,000 strong now. But during the last 16 years, 50,000 people have left us.

You hire from campuses in Tier-II, -III cities. How would rate the performance of candidates from smaller cities?

I think there is no difference in intellect between anybody from any state. As a rule, candidates from bigger cities are better trained, better educated and can communicate better. Candidates from smaller towns whether in Karnataka, West Bengal, Bihar or wherever it is - most of them are not able to communicate effectively. But they are very bright people.

Anybody who wants to be hired by Infosys has to pass a test, and the test checks your intellectual capabilities and logical thinking. After that, we train them in all fields, including communication. We have discovered that people who have come from cities do better, while people from smaller towns have to work hard.

What is the logic behind hiring science graduates?

No. We want to create an alternative pool of very bright people who can be trained. This year, of the 17,000 people we are planning to hire for out IT services, around 3,000 will be BSc graduates. And these people are certainly very bright.