60,000 IT professionals in US return home

India's fast growing economy and leaping information technology sector is attracting home more and more Indian from the Silicon Valley and the Indus Entrepreneur Group estimates that around 60,000 may have returned in recent years, a media report said on Monday.

No region of the United States has been more affected by this trend than Silicon Valley. TIE had reported in 2003 that between 15,000 and 20,000 Indians have returned and Charter member of the organization Vish Mishra told San Jose Mercury News that the trend had continued and about 40,000 more had gone back in the last four years.

Mishra, who is a senior venture partner with Clearstone Ventures, said the flow of investment capital to India also has expanded, much of it from Silicon Valley VC firms.

Clearstone Venture Partners now has an office in Mumbai, as do many other firms that either are based in or originated in Silicon Valley.

During the 12-month period that ended in August 2006, Mishra told the paper, VC firms invested 2 billion dollars in early and late-stage companies. The report quotes a study released earlier this year by Anna-Lee Saxenian of the University of California-Berkeley and by Duke University, as saying Indians founded 15 per cent of all Silicon Valley start-ups.

The study also found that 53 per cent of the science and engineering workforce in the valley is foreign-born, and that one-quarter of immigrant-founded engineering and scientific companies set up in the United States during the past decade were by Indians. These companies rang up 52 billion dollars in sales and created 450,000 jobs. No wonder, notes the paper, some business and policy leaders are sounding alarm bells about American competitiveness in general and Silicon Valley's future as a technology leader in particular.

The Mercury News says there isn't a single major information-technology company in the United States that hasn't set up operations in India.

IT companies are attracted by low-cost, highly skilled workforce; 3.5 million white-collar US jobs, along with 151 billion dollars in wages, are expected to be outsourced by 2015, with India the top outsourcing destination, the paper says quoting a report by Forrester Research.

But these companies also see a market of potentially epic proportions, the paper says. Half of India's 1.2 billion people are younger than 25. That's 600 million people coming into their peak consuming years in an economy fueled primarily by exploding retail growth.

As Amar Babu of Intel India (where 15 per cent of the workforce is made up of Indians) who returned from the United States, explained, "Intel views India as a critical research and development site. At the same time, India is a consumption market for IT. A lot of future growth will come from these emerging markets".