nina
2004-06-13 19:36:10 UTC
In a city of squalor, technology has constructed an empire
SQUEEZED INTO A TAXI HURTLING along Hosur Road, it's easy for visitors to
forget they are in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, and America's back
office.
Hosur Road is dilapidated and dangerous. Cows sacred to Hindus nose through
burning garbage. Bodies, dead, drunk or sick, sprawl in gutters as a mass of
humanity teems above them.
More than 300 pedestrians died on Bangalore's mean streets last year. Hosur
Road, a four-lane thoroughfare with few crosswalks or traffic lights, is one
of the worst in the city, where 800 people are killed in crashes every year.
The road, a half-world away from Colorado Springs, could hardly be more
different from Garden of the Gods Road, our city's technology hub, where
giants Intel, Agilent and MCI provide thousands of high-paying jobs.
For all its grime and gridlock, Hosur Road is the main drag to Electronics
City, an assemblage of gleaming marble and glass buildings where Indian tech
companies have taken root and U.S. companies under pressure to cut costs are
mushrooming.
It is in places such as Bangalore's Electronics City that Colorado Springs'
high-tech industry faces a challenge from low-paying, aggressive Indian
companies with a highly-educated workforce.
A hiring frenzy is taking place on Hosur Road.
Wipro, a billion-dollar software services company, hired 3,500 people last
year. Infosys, a competitor, hired 10,000 engineers and plans to add another
10,000 this year. HTMT, which provides customer services, may double its
workforce to 3,000 this year.
By contrast, Colorado Springs' high-tech jobs - which significantly boosted
the area's wealth during the 1990s - are in decline and may never return.
Nearly 7,500 of those jobs have vanished since the recession began four
years ago.
At least 1,300 jobs moved overseas to places like Bangalore, where software
engineers earn $20,000 a year - about one-third what U.S. starting engineers
make - and call-center employees start at $250 a month.
"The IT market is better in Bangalore than it is here," says Rick
Nashleanas, who started a recruiting company in Colorado Springs after
selling his mainframe software business to a German firm in 1996.
Nashleanas has known U.S. tech workers who now make pizza, sell cars and
drive trucks to survive. "Things are getting better, but it's never going to
be the same as the market was in 1999," he says.
That is why Colorado Springs is deeply affected by what is happening in this
growing sweatbox of a city 11,000 miles away.
In a word, jobs.
By some estimates more engineers are in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley,
and 40,000 people hold Ph.D.s.
The corporate signs hanging in every corner of Bangalore say it all:
Familiar firms such as Agilent, Oracle, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, companies
with employees in Colorado Springs, are all here, creating thousands of jobs
Americans will never get.
Despite Bangalore's shortcomings - widespread poverty, poor services and the
unexpected upheaval of May's national elections that forced former Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to resign - the city has become something of a
ominous threat to Colorado's high-tech industry.
Bangalore in just 10 years has achieved the level of techno-world myth. With
more than six million residents, the city puts a human face on the debate
about outsourcing, the controversial shift of U.S. jobs overseas.
Bangalore sits near the southern tip of the vast Indian subcontinent, 800
miles north of the equator. During its 500-year history, the city was ruled
by maharajahs and British overseers while tigers roamed scrub forests
nearby.
Today, protected by distance from India's arch-enemy Pakistan and from
politicians in New Delhi, Bangalore has developed into a defense, research,
education and industrial hub.
More than 1,300 foreign and Indian tech companies with 150,000 employees are
represented here.
Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, General Electric Co. and other
prominent U.S. firms rub shoulders with India's homegrown giants Wipro,
Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services, all billion-dollar companies.
"We've got a small, mini-U.S. here, a mini-Silicon Valley, a mini-Boston,
and a mini-Seattle," says professor S. Sadagopan, who runs the Indian
Institute of Information Technology, one of the city's 11 engineering
schools churning out hundreds of engineers a year.
The outsourcing tide is escalating.
Forrester Research, a Massachusetts technology consulting firm, last month
said white-collar jobs are flowing overseas faster than first thought.
In 2002, Forrester predicted 3.3 million jobs would shift to India and other
countries by 2015. The forecast touched off a furor about outsourcing, which
a broad range of critics agree has become a hot-button issue stirring
business and political debate this year.
Forrester now says the losses will come sooner. By the end of next year,
830,000 jobs will have been shipped abroad, 242,000 more than earlier
predicted.
Despite a backlash caused by media coverage, companies aren't abandoning
plans to move jobs to India, where they can hire software engineers and
fluent English speakers to provide back-office services such as accounting,
payroll and help-desk work for thousands of dollars less per year.
The technology sector will be hardest hit - 181,000 jobs by next year,
followed by business, management, sales and legal work.
The job flow makes Ravi Ramu smile.
"We wonder sometimes," says Ramu, chief financial officer of MphasiS BFL, an
Indian software developer and back-office outsourcing firm, "when we will
become the Silicon Valley of the United States."
Although Ramu's remark is a joke, it's a reminder of similar comments that
have stoked American self-doubt, when the nation feels economically
vulnerable and not in control.
In the early 1990s, many thought Japan's economy would overtake the U.S.
economy. A Japanese politician made headlines in 1992 by calling American
workers lazy and illiterate.
At the height of the Cold War, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev rattled
Americans when he said, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.
We will bury you." A year later, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
and spawned the space race.
Today, the transfer of white-collar jobs to low-wage countries is driving
Americans' anxiety. Invisible during the boom years of the 1990s,
outsourcing suddenly is the bogeyman blamed for America's jobless economic
recovery.
IN INDIA, OUTSOURCING'S GROUND ZERO is Bangalore. It is a drought-stricken
city of simultaneous construction and rot. The city has about 400 officially
recognized slums, where 20 percent of the population lives. Alongside tent
cities and rubble-filled fields, gleaming buildings spring up to provide
state-of-the art workplaces for thousands of educated software and
call-center workers.
"There are contractors who will take a piece of land, put up a building,
usually not more than three levels. Excepting for the computers and the
instruments and the people, everything is ready in 100 days," says Sadagopan
of the Indian Institute of Information Technology.
The landscaped campus of his graduate institute was built in 87 days.
Founded four years ago, the school pours out doctoral graduates destined for
careers in India's $15 billion technology sector.
"We never have to worry about placing the students. Everybody gets placed,"
Sadagopan says.
With 1 billion Indians to choose from, companies select only the best. A
university degree is mandatory, even for call-center work. For every 100
applicants, companies might hire five.
Software jobs are even tougher to get. Infosys hired 1 percent of the 1
million engineers who sought work with the software development company last
year.
Once hired, employees enter a work world where only the best minds thrive.
More than 65 percent of the 1,700 scientists and engineers at General
Electric's John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore have advanced
degrees. One in five have worked somewhere else in the world.
"In Bangalore, we have one of our four global research centers (the others
are in Shanghai, Germany and upstate New York). It supports research and
development work for all of our businesses around the world," GE spokesman
Peter Stack says.
The center, named for former GE chairman Jack Welch, opened in 2000 with 275
engineers, scientists and researchers working in a 183,000 square-foot
building.
By 2002, the payroll had expanded to 1,525, and the campus grew to more than
a half-million square feet, supporting research and development work for GE'
s worldwide businesses.
"India represents a particularly valuable source of intellectual capital, in
terms of employees who are English-literate and conversant and the product
of an excellent higher educational system," Stack says.
GE has been in India since 1902. Its Indian work force is 20,000 and
growing. The company's New Delhi-based GE Capital International Services
unit provides back-office services such as accounting, payroll and help-desk
work to the company's 11 businesses worldwide.
While GE's presence in India is growing, the company has maintained its U.S.
payroll at 160,000 for the past decade, Stack says.
"We've aggressively invested in the higher-tech, higher-growth part of our
business and work hard to sustain a technical advantages in as many of those
businesses as possible," Stack says.
High unemployment in other parts of India, as well as the prospect of jobs
that pay more than the country's $2,600 per-capita income, contribute to
Bangalore's massive population growth. Since 2000, the number of people
living in the city has increased by almost 1 million.
As a result, Bangalore has a more diverse population than bigger Indian
cities, says Sadagopan, who likens it to New York. Both are cosmopolitan,
polyglot cities with large ethnic populations.
Less than half of Bangalore speaks, Kannada, the language of the state of
Karnataka, which helps explain why English still is spoken widely and
cricket is the favorite sport 57 years after the last British governor
departed.
The city has a tradition of welcoming outsiders thanks to a research culture
that began years ago. Nonmilitary research labs sprang up alongside the
military. Institutes are devoted to coconut, pulp, wood, plastic,
telecommunications and aeronautical engineering research.
"This city, if you go by per square feet, it has the highest number of
Ph.D.s in the world," Sadagopan says.
Small wonder that overseas outsourcing is unpopular in the United States.
By a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Harris poll, most Americans disagree with
President Bush's chief economic advisor, Greg Mankiw, who said outsourcing
is good for the economy.
More than seven of 10 Americans think U.S. companies should not replace
American information technology and call-center workers with cheaper Indian
workers, according to the poll.
Complicating the confusion are the benefits outsourcing bestows.
By shifting work to India, where a call-center operator earns $250 a month
and a software engineer makes one-fifth of a U.S. software engineer's
$60,000 salary, American companies stay competitive with foreign companies,
and consumers pay lower prices.
"We deliver extremely high-quality software. More than 92 percent of our
projects have been delivered on time and within budget," says Mohandas Pai,
director and chief financial officer of software developer Infosys.
Sending jobs offshore brings economic benefits, Indian executives say.
In America, many call-center jobs are viewed as undesirable, but Indian
workers see them as desirable and a step toward a career.
"They are people who want these jobs. These are 'aspirational' jobs," says
Akshaya Bhargava, chief executive officer of Progeon, a subsidiary of
Infosys. "They are motivated. I think a lot of people who come to work with
us are really building a career and they see this as the first step in their
career."
Pai thinks America's fears are overblown.
At most, about 240,000 jobs have gone to India during the past five or six
years, he says. That number is miniscule compared with employment in the
United States, which stands at 140 million.
"People say that, 10 years from now, there will be a shortage of labor in
the United States. I don't know what the number will be, but (the shortage)
will be there," says Pai, a jovial tycoon who sniffs at free-trade critics
and thinks Americans will come to see outsourcing's benefits.
OUTSOURCING HAS TAPPED AMERICANS' deep-seated fears about the economy, which
until March had generated practically no jobs to replace 3 million lost
since the recession began in 2001.
The loss - 2 percent of all jobs - is worse than during the jobless recovery
of the early 1990s, when employment never fell by more than 1.3 percent.
At the same time, the majority of the jobs lost since payrolls peaked three
years ago were the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are
not coming back, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
As the economy has expanded since November 2001, when the recession ended,
businesses have put off hiring, stepped up automation and exported jobs to
India and other low-wage countries, the study suggests.
THE ROAD TO BANGALORE STRETCHES eastward halfway around the world from
Colorado Springs, 11œ time zones away. When a Colorado Springs
businessperson clocks out at 6 p.m., a new day dawns in Bangalore.
Indian companies exploit the half-day difference. Programmers in Bangalore
labor through the day while their U.S. counterparts sleep. Unhampered by
visas, borders or geographic distance, new software code zips across the
Internet, arriving in time for the start of business in America.
Low-tech call centers operate the same way.
Telemarketers work day shifts to reach Americans at home during the evening.
Technical support employees may toil through the night to solve computer
questions or reroute Internet connections of American consumers.
Traveling across Bangalore, it seems unlikely India could ever seriously
challenge the highly developed economies of First World countries such as
the United States and Japan.
Crushing poverty, unemployment and lack of development are everywhere in
India's fifth-largest city. Telephone and power services are spotty.
Forests of graceful flowering trees that cooled the city have been
sacrificed to rapid urbanization. Longtime residents say summer temperatures
have risen by 20 degrees. Shortages may force city officials to transport
water by train.
INDIA'S SILICON VALLEY
The payroll of tech firm MphasiS BFL will expand from 6,400 to 7,000 when it
finishes acquiring an Indian software company.
IBM is launching a technology center to provide design services for advanced
chips and hardware boards to companies across Asia.
Intel is investing $41 million in India to set up a Bangalore facility to
design and develop microprocessors. The world's biggest chip maker plans to
double its Indian staff to 2,000 by year's end.
Another U.S. chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, is setting up an
engineering center to boost its microprocessor design program.
America Online has begun hiring software engineers for new Bangalore office.
Infosys, which hired 10,000 engineers last year, expects to add another
10,000 this year.
Progeon, the back-office unit of Infosys, hired 500 people during the first
three months of this year and will hire more.
SQUEEZED INTO A TAXI HURTLING along Hosur Road, it's easy for visitors to
forget they are in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, and America's back
office.
Hosur Road is dilapidated and dangerous. Cows sacred to Hindus nose through
burning garbage. Bodies, dead, drunk or sick, sprawl in gutters as a mass of
humanity teems above them.
More than 300 pedestrians died on Bangalore's mean streets last year. Hosur
Road, a four-lane thoroughfare with few crosswalks or traffic lights, is one
of the worst in the city, where 800 people are killed in crashes every year.
The road, a half-world away from Colorado Springs, could hardly be more
different from Garden of the Gods Road, our city's technology hub, where
giants Intel, Agilent and MCI provide thousands of high-paying jobs.
For all its grime and gridlock, Hosur Road is the main drag to Electronics
City, an assemblage of gleaming marble and glass buildings where Indian tech
companies have taken root and U.S. companies under pressure to cut costs are
mushrooming.
It is in places such as Bangalore's Electronics City that Colorado Springs'
high-tech industry faces a challenge from low-paying, aggressive Indian
companies with a highly-educated workforce.
A hiring frenzy is taking place on Hosur Road.
Wipro, a billion-dollar software services company, hired 3,500 people last
year. Infosys, a competitor, hired 10,000 engineers and plans to add another
10,000 this year. HTMT, which provides customer services, may double its
workforce to 3,000 this year.
By contrast, Colorado Springs' high-tech jobs - which significantly boosted
the area's wealth during the 1990s - are in decline and may never return.
Nearly 7,500 of those jobs have vanished since the recession began four
years ago.
At least 1,300 jobs moved overseas to places like Bangalore, where software
engineers earn $20,000 a year - about one-third what U.S. starting engineers
make - and call-center employees start at $250 a month.
"The IT market is better in Bangalore than it is here," says Rick
Nashleanas, who started a recruiting company in Colorado Springs after
selling his mainframe software business to a German firm in 1996.
Nashleanas has known U.S. tech workers who now make pizza, sell cars and
drive trucks to survive. "Things are getting better, but it's never going to
be the same as the market was in 1999," he says.
That is why Colorado Springs is deeply affected by what is happening in this
growing sweatbox of a city 11,000 miles away.
In a word, jobs.
By some estimates more engineers are in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley,
and 40,000 people hold Ph.D.s.
The corporate signs hanging in every corner of Bangalore say it all:
Familiar firms such as Agilent, Oracle, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, companies
with employees in Colorado Springs, are all here, creating thousands of jobs
Americans will never get.
Despite Bangalore's shortcomings - widespread poverty, poor services and the
unexpected upheaval of May's national elections that forced former Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to resign - the city has become something of a
ominous threat to Colorado's high-tech industry.
Bangalore in just 10 years has achieved the level of techno-world myth. With
more than six million residents, the city puts a human face on the debate
about outsourcing, the controversial shift of U.S. jobs overseas.
Bangalore sits near the southern tip of the vast Indian subcontinent, 800
miles north of the equator. During its 500-year history, the city was ruled
by maharajahs and British overseers while tigers roamed scrub forests
nearby.
Today, protected by distance from India's arch-enemy Pakistan and from
politicians in New Delhi, Bangalore has developed into a defense, research,
education and industrial hub.
More than 1,300 foreign and Indian tech companies with 150,000 employees are
represented here.
Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, General Electric Co. and other
prominent U.S. firms rub shoulders with India's homegrown giants Wipro,
Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services, all billion-dollar companies.
"We've got a small, mini-U.S. here, a mini-Silicon Valley, a mini-Boston,
and a mini-Seattle," says professor S. Sadagopan, who runs the Indian
Institute of Information Technology, one of the city's 11 engineering
schools churning out hundreds of engineers a year.
The outsourcing tide is escalating.
Forrester Research, a Massachusetts technology consulting firm, last month
said white-collar jobs are flowing overseas faster than first thought.
In 2002, Forrester predicted 3.3 million jobs would shift to India and other
countries by 2015. The forecast touched off a furor about outsourcing, which
a broad range of critics agree has become a hot-button issue stirring
business and political debate this year.
Forrester now says the losses will come sooner. By the end of next year,
830,000 jobs will have been shipped abroad, 242,000 more than earlier
predicted.
Despite a backlash caused by media coverage, companies aren't abandoning
plans to move jobs to India, where they can hire software engineers and
fluent English speakers to provide back-office services such as accounting,
payroll and help-desk work for thousands of dollars less per year.
The technology sector will be hardest hit - 181,000 jobs by next year,
followed by business, management, sales and legal work.
The job flow makes Ravi Ramu smile.
"We wonder sometimes," says Ramu, chief financial officer of MphasiS BFL, an
Indian software developer and back-office outsourcing firm, "when we will
become the Silicon Valley of the United States."
Although Ramu's remark is a joke, it's a reminder of similar comments that
have stoked American self-doubt, when the nation feels economically
vulnerable and not in control.
In the early 1990s, many thought Japan's economy would overtake the U.S.
economy. A Japanese politician made headlines in 1992 by calling American
workers lazy and illiterate.
At the height of the Cold War, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev rattled
Americans when he said, "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.
We will bury you." A year later, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
and spawned the space race.
Today, the transfer of white-collar jobs to low-wage countries is driving
Americans' anxiety. Invisible during the boom years of the 1990s,
outsourcing suddenly is the bogeyman blamed for America's jobless economic
recovery.
IN INDIA, OUTSOURCING'S GROUND ZERO is Bangalore. It is a drought-stricken
city of simultaneous construction and rot. The city has about 400 officially
recognized slums, where 20 percent of the population lives. Alongside tent
cities and rubble-filled fields, gleaming buildings spring up to provide
state-of-the art workplaces for thousands of educated software and
call-center workers.
"There are contractors who will take a piece of land, put up a building,
usually not more than three levels. Excepting for the computers and the
instruments and the people, everything is ready in 100 days," says Sadagopan
of the Indian Institute of Information Technology.
The landscaped campus of his graduate institute was built in 87 days.
Founded four years ago, the school pours out doctoral graduates destined for
careers in India's $15 billion technology sector.
"We never have to worry about placing the students. Everybody gets placed,"
Sadagopan says.
With 1 billion Indians to choose from, companies select only the best. A
university degree is mandatory, even for call-center work. For every 100
applicants, companies might hire five.
Software jobs are even tougher to get. Infosys hired 1 percent of the 1
million engineers who sought work with the software development company last
year.
Once hired, employees enter a work world where only the best minds thrive.
More than 65 percent of the 1,700 scientists and engineers at General
Electric's John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore have advanced
degrees. One in five have worked somewhere else in the world.
"In Bangalore, we have one of our four global research centers (the others
are in Shanghai, Germany and upstate New York). It supports research and
development work for all of our businesses around the world," GE spokesman
Peter Stack says.
The center, named for former GE chairman Jack Welch, opened in 2000 with 275
engineers, scientists and researchers working in a 183,000 square-foot
building.
By 2002, the payroll had expanded to 1,525, and the campus grew to more than
a half-million square feet, supporting research and development work for GE'
s worldwide businesses.
"India represents a particularly valuable source of intellectual capital, in
terms of employees who are English-literate and conversant and the product
of an excellent higher educational system," Stack says.
GE has been in India since 1902. Its Indian work force is 20,000 and
growing. The company's New Delhi-based GE Capital International Services
unit provides back-office services such as accounting, payroll and help-desk
work to the company's 11 businesses worldwide.
While GE's presence in India is growing, the company has maintained its U.S.
payroll at 160,000 for the past decade, Stack says.
"We've aggressively invested in the higher-tech, higher-growth part of our
business and work hard to sustain a technical advantages in as many of those
businesses as possible," Stack says.
High unemployment in other parts of India, as well as the prospect of jobs
that pay more than the country's $2,600 per-capita income, contribute to
Bangalore's massive population growth. Since 2000, the number of people
living in the city has increased by almost 1 million.
As a result, Bangalore has a more diverse population than bigger Indian
cities, says Sadagopan, who likens it to New York. Both are cosmopolitan,
polyglot cities with large ethnic populations.
Less than half of Bangalore speaks, Kannada, the language of the state of
Karnataka, which helps explain why English still is spoken widely and
cricket is the favorite sport 57 years after the last British governor
departed.
The city has a tradition of welcoming outsiders thanks to a research culture
that began years ago. Nonmilitary research labs sprang up alongside the
military. Institutes are devoted to coconut, pulp, wood, plastic,
telecommunications and aeronautical engineering research.
"This city, if you go by per square feet, it has the highest number of
Ph.D.s in the world," Sadagopan says.
Small wonder that overseas outsourcing is unpopular in the United States.
By a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Harris poll, most Americans disagree with
President Bush's chief economic advisor, Greg Mankiw, who said outsourcing
is good for the economy.
More than seven of 10 Americans think U.S. companies should not replace
American information technology and call-center workers with cheaper Indian
workers, according to the poll.
Complicating the confusion are the benefits outsourcing bestows.
By shifting work to India, where a call-center operator earns $250 a month
and a software engineer makes one-fifth of a U.S. software engineer's
$60,000 salary, American companies stay competitive with foreign companies,
and consumers pay lower prices.
"We deliver extremely high-quality software. More than 92 percent of our
projects have been delivered on time and within budget," says Mohandas Pai,
director and chief financial officer of software developer Infosys.
Sending jobs offshore brings economic benefits, Indian executives say.
In America, many call-center jobs are viewed as undesirable, but Indian
workers see them as desirable and a step toward a career.
"They are people who want these jobs. These are 'aspirational' jobs," says
Akshaya Bhargava, chief executive officer of Progeon, a subsidiary of
Infosys. "They are motivated. I think a lot of people who come to work with
us are really building a career and they see this as the first step in their
career."
Pai thinks America's fears are overblown.
At most, about 240,000 jobs have gone to India during the past five or six
years, he says. That number is miniscule compared with employment in the
United States, which stands at 140 million.
"People say that, 10 years from now, there will be a shortage of labor in
the United States. I don't know what the number will be, but (the shortage)
will be there," says Pai, a jovial tycoon who sniffs at free-trade critics
and thinks Americans will come to see outsourcing's benefits.
OUTSOURCING HAS TAPPED AMERICANS' deep-seated fears about the economy, which
until March had generated practically no jobs to replace 3 million lost
since the recession began in 2001.
The loss - 2 percent of all jobs - is worse than during the jobless recovery
of the early 1990s, when employment never fell by more than 1.3 percent.
At the same time, the majority of the jobs lost since payrolls peaked three
years ago were the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are
not coming back, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
As the economy has expanded since November 2001, when the recession ended,
businesses have put off hiring, stepped up automation and exported jobs to
India and other low-wage countries, the study suggests.
THE ROAD TO BANGALORE STRETCHES eastward halfway around the world from
Colorado Springs, 11œ time zones away. When a Colorado Springs
businessperson clocks out at 6 p.m., a new day dawns in Bangalore.
Indian companies exploit the half-day difference. Programmers in Bangalore
labor through the day while their U.S. counterparts sleep. Unhampered by
visas, borders or geographic distance, new software code zips across the
Internet, arriving in time for the start of business in America.
Low-tech call centers operate the same way.
Telemarketers work day shifts to reach Americans at home during the evening.
Technical support employees may toil through the night to solve computer
questions or reroute Internet connections of American consumers.
Traveling across Bangalore, it seems unlikely India could ever seriously
challenge the highly developed economies of First World countries such as
the United States and Japan.
Crushing poverty, unemployment and lack of development are everywhere in
India's fifth-largest city. Telephone and power services are spotty.
Forests of graceful flowering trees that cooled the city have been
sacrificed to rapid urbanization. Longtime residents say summer temperatures
have risen by 20 degrees. Shortages may force city officials to transport
water by train.
INDIA'S SILICON VALLEY
The payroll of tech firm MphasiS BFL will expand from 6,400 to 7,000 when it
finishes acquiring an Indian software company.
IBM is launching a technology center to provide design services for advanced
chips and hardware boards to companies across Asia.
Intel is investing $41 million in India to set up a Bangalore facility to
design and develop microprocessors. The world's biggest chip maker plans to
double its Indian staff to 2,000 by year's end.
Another U.S. chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, is setting up an
engineering center to boost its microprocessor design program.
America Online has begun hiring software engineers for new Bangalore office.
Infosys, which hired 10,000 engineers last year, expects to add another
10,000 this year.
Progeon, the back-office unit of Infosys, hired 500 people during the first
three months of this year and will hire more.
--
***********************************************************************
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling,
a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way
of the best happiness.
- Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
***********************************************************************
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling,
a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way
of the best happiness.
- Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra