Productivity per employee at top companies low

A top supercomputer expert on Monday said productivity per employee at India's celebrity companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam was almost a factor of ten lower than some top IT companies elsewhere in the world and called for creation of new companies or consortium of companies with high per capita productivity.

"There is ample scope for India to develop newer companies or a consortium of companies that have per capita productivity at least five to ten times higher than the present Indian IT majors," N Balakrishnan, Professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, told the Indian Science Congress.

"Web-based software, content development for education, scientific computing, networking, embedded software and e-governance in a coordinated way would pave the way for such a dream," he said.

For IT to act as a vehicle for India's development and to make it very robust, two ingredients must exist, Balakrishnan said.

The first is to have optimal per capita productivity for the IT sector so that India as a country could move up the value chain. The second is the drive towards increasing the domestic market for IT.