[Kictanet] Re: India's Weaknesses

[bitange at jambo.co.ke]

Dear All,
I think there are good lessons to learn from the article below.

Regards

Ndemo.


October 17, 2006
Skills Gap Hurts Technology Boom in India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/somini_sengupta/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

TIRUCHENGODE, India
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/india/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>
— As its technology companies soar to the outsourcing skies, India is
bumping up against an improbable challenge. In a country once regarded as
a bottomless well of low-cost, ready-to-work, English-speaking engineers,
a shortage looms.

India still produces plenty of engineers, nearly 400,000 a year at last
count. But their competence has become the issue.

A study commissioned by a trade group, the National Association of
Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, found only one in four
engineering graduates to be employable. The rest were deficient in the
required technical skills, fluency in English or ability to work in a team
or deliver basic oral presentations.

The skills gap reflects the narrow availability of high-quality college
education in India and the galloping pace of the country's service-driven
economy, which is growing faster than nearly all but China's. The software
and service companies provide technology services to foreign companies,
many of them based in the United States. Software exports alone expanded
by 33 percent in the last year.

The university systems of few countries would be able to keep up with such
demand, and India is certainly having trouble. The best and most selective
universities generate too few graduates, and new private colleges are
producing graduates of uneven quality.

Many fear that the labor pinch may signal bottlenecks in other parts of
the economy. It is already being felt in the information technology
sector.

With the number of technology jobs expected to nearly double to 1.7
million in the next four years, companies are scrambling to find fresh
engineering talent and to upgrade the schools that produce it.

Some companies are training faculty members themselves, offering courses
tailored to industry needs and improving college labs and libraries. They
are rushing to get first choice of would-be engineers long before they
have completed their course work. And they are fanning out to small,
remote colleges that almost no one had heard of before. The country's most
successful technology concerns can no longer afford to hire only