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.