Narayanan Madhavan

BANGALORE: Carlos Gomez Uribe, a 21-year-old Mexican studying at Boston's elite technology institute, has come to India not as a college backpacker of yore but as part of the 21st-century global ambitions of India's "Silicon Valley".

Uribe is one of 22 interns picked out of 800 applicants from a dozen top technology and business schools in the United States, Canada and France by India's leading technology firm, Infosys Technologies Ltd. Nasdaq-listed Infosys is trying to shake its image of a low-cost provider of software for global giants and become a multi-cultural international company of its own.

"When we look at what we mean by globalisation, it means being global in all respects," Infosys managing director Nandan Nilekani told Reuters in the firm's 50-acre campus in India's high-tech capital, Bangalore. Infosys, India's second largest software exporter with 10,000 now on the payroll, last year kicked off its global Internship program with 14 interns chosen from 300 applicants.

"What interested me was Bangalore," said Sandrine Rol, a 22-year-old management student from France's ESSEC Business School."I would like to specialise in cross-cultural training."

Exotic travel, modest pay
The interns spend between six weeks and six months in Bangalore and get a modest Rs 15,000 rupees ($312) a month as an allowance, besides food, accommodation and round-trip airfare.

Eating local food, travelling around India's exotic destinations and watching "Bollywood" Hindi movies are some of the fringe benefits. But the interns also get job experience - and Infosys says the company benefits from their work.

Uribe, from Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he wrote a program for Infosys that will help migrate old Cobol language applications to the Internet language, XML. "I always wanted to come to India," Uribe said. "Mexico and India have some parallelisms...but in Mexico we don't have companies like Infosys."

Rol worked on a project to boost Infosys's media image in Europe, a market the software giant is courting actively now that the United States is in a sharp downturn this year.

Company officials want the intern program to be a springboard for Infosys to raise its profile as a global employer and attract new talent into its Bangalore headquarters.

"Maybe they have some expertise which the organization does not have," said Aditi Madhok, program manager for the internship scheme, adding the interns are changing the conventional wisdom that India only exports talent.

Reverse brain drain
"It is a reverse brain drain they bring," she said. Right now, 99 per cent of Infosys's employees - 3,000 of whom are overseas-are Indian. The company aims to change that.

Most interns work in Bangalore but a few work in other offices, including one at Toronto. Madhok said three of the 14 interns applied last year for jobs with Infosys. Two were hired.

This year, one American intern has sought a job, even if it means getting only a fraction of the pay he would get in the US

This summer, Infosys recruited interns from two French business schools and 10 US-based institutions, including Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school.

The intern program was launched in part as a recruitment vehicle because of a tight job market, but that is no longer the case, analysts said.

Sukumar Rajah, fund manager at ITI Pioneer Mutual Fund, told Reuters that global hiring made more sense before the slowdown, when there were fears that Indian talent would become costlier. "All these things will take a backseat," he said. "In the current mode, the constraint is not the availability of people."

About 71 per cent of Infosys's revenue in the quarter ended September was from North America, mostly the United States and only 19 per cent from Europe. The company on Wednesday beat market forecasts by a whisker by showing a second quarter net profit of Rs 2.01 billion ($41.9 million), up 31 per cent from the year-ago period.

It expects revenue of $535-$545 million in 2001/02 (April-March), up from about $416 million in 2000/01. Founded nearly two decades ago, Infosys has steadily built up a reputation, serving clients like network gear maker Cisco Systems and telecoms giant Nortel Networks In 1999, it became the first Indian firm to list on the Nasdaq.

Its growth, doubling in revenue every year for the past four years, has been forecast lower at 30 per cent in the current fiscal year, but it still plans to add more than 1,500 employees, in a year when layoffs are the flavour of the season in America.

Apart from software centers in three Indian cities, Infosys has a competence Centre in Toronto, which has 60 mainly local employees, three small centers in the United States and one in Britain.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.