In March, Infosys began trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the first Indian company to be listed on a U.S. exchange. Its shares soared as much as 50 percent on the first day of trading. Taking a cue from Infosys, NIIT Ltd., another Indian software company, is seeking to list on Nasdaq within a year. Once the Indian Government lowered taxes on foreign chip and computer manufacturers, a host of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, IBM and Novell arrived. Today, the city has 250 software companies, many of them linked by satellite to home offices in the United States.
Salaries are lavish by Indian standards.
But investors complain of a collapsing infrastructure for a population that has doubled to 6 million in just eight years. The roads are bad, the power inadequate and the phones unreliable. Efforts to build an international airport have met repeated delays. The city loses large numbers of programmers to the West every year. New companies are looking at Hyderabad, where a business minded techno-savvy chief minister appears determined to topple Bangalore as India's software Mecca.