At the university level, the demand for skilled ICT engineers and managers is outstripping the capacity of the educational system. On the other hand, retention of skilled young people is improving more than half of the graduates of the best computer institutes now stay in India. Low labor costs continue to be an Indian advantage, belying the fact that more Indian companies than U.S. companies have earned the top rating from Carnegie Mellon University s Software Engineering Institute. India s 1 billion people are only beginning to be affected by this change. Bullock carts overloaded with sugar cane still creep past the telephone access shops that have sprung up in every village the drivers and shop operators unaware of the valuable information about crop markets that lies just beyond their reach in cyberspace.
Progress is slowed by a difficult working relationship between the public and private sectors.
As a result, the private sector has moved forward where there are fewer obstacles. Call centers, a leading service export, are assisted by cost structures for overseas connections, but held back by regulation in domestic markets. In the meantime, Indian companies and the U.S. companies who have partnered with them are weathering the slowdown in the global information technology industry better than many of their peers. The opportunity that this situation creates should not go unexamined by the United States, the world s largest buyer of programming services. The FCW.COM privacy policy , our link disclaimer and information about linking to us and online permissions .