India has the potential to grow its knowledge process offshoring market to $12 billion by fiscal 2010 from the current $720 million, business research firm Evalueserve said on Tuesday.

Given the large number of engineers, doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants and scientists in the country, Indian knowledge process offshoring services could grow to $12 billion by fiscal 2010 registering a cumulative growth rate of 58 per cent, Ashish Gupta, country head, Evalueserve said.

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This would provide employment opportunities to 250,000 professionals during the same period and would therefore provide direct employment to 300,000 people.

At the same time, global knowledge process offshoring market is likely to touch $17 billion growing at 46 per cent CAGR as compared to a projected $39.8 billion from vanilla business process outsourcing services, which is poised to grow at 26 per cent.

Gupta said India is likely to earn about 40 per cent of its revenue in non-IT offshore servcies provision space through knowledge process offshoring by 2010 and while low-end BPO services may fetch $18 billion by 2010.

India, China and Russia with their high reservoir of professionals are well placed to tap this knowledge process offshoring opportunity.

"With increasing expertise and maturity, offshore vendors will inevitably start offering knowledge process offshoring services", he said.

knowledge process offshoring as compared to business process outsourcing delivers higher value to organistaions that offshore their domain based processes.

Under knowledge process offshoring, research for intellectual property, equity, finance and insurance, data search, integration and mining, human resource development, engineering and design and medical content could be taken up.

The Evalueserve report said that drafting and filing of patent applications with US Patent and Trademark office is expensive and a typical application costs between $10,000-15000.