A few years ago, a high-tech immigration brouhaha developed in the U.S., as a lot of companies were able to go to places like India to hire software developers, then bring them into the U.S. on special work visas for specialized talent. Today, much of that same work is being done in their homeland. To complete the cycle, those workers are working for homegrown companies like NIIT Ltd.
     The National Assoc. of Software and Service Companies projects that the Indian software industry will be raking in US$87 billion by 2008, while it stands at a mere US$5.7 billion today. And the association looks for a tripling of women in the work force as a primary impetus to that growth, fueled by a general loosening of the age-old gender roles that have dominated Indian society for centuries. NIIT backs up its ventures with training institutes, where it conducts classes for 150,000 students. Cisco is founding 32 networking academies to train even more IT workers (so many have been leaving that even India is facing a shortage come 2002).
     Mike Harling notes that instead of importing IT talent from elsewhere as in the past, some UK-based tech firms "are increasingly considering India, for example, to set up a facility, instead of expanding in Europe." According to an article by R. Subramanyam in The Economic Times, in 1999-2000, the country's software sector grew by 53 percent, to $5.7 billion, over 10 percent of the nation's total export revenues. High-tech leaders are renewing the call to use part of that expertise to renovate the country's infrastructure, from roads and sewage to schools and electricity.
     When quizzed about high-tech magnets outside Europe and the U.S., Harling says Asia is where to look. "I would particularly highlight Singapore, followed by the Hong Kong part of China and Taiwan," he says. "All these countries consider the twin goals of high-tech technical infrastructure and high-tech labor force to be vital. Singapore is probably ahead of the game worldwide at the moment, but is helped by its small size."
     In Singapore, Seagate Technology's Seagate Science Park, the only disc drive design center outside the U.S., is one of hundreds of firms that continues to generate high-tech innovation. But at the same time, Malaysia as a whole is experiencing a slight drop in electronics exports, forcing Seagate to recently consolidate two of its five plants there. Meanwhile, Penang has attracted multiple high-tech manufacturing facilities from the likes of Agilent, Matsushita and Komag, maker of thin-film media.

Adam Bruns is a free-lance business writer based in Lexington, Ky.,
and associate editor of The Lane Report, a Kentucky business magazine.