Bangalore: So far American firms have been picking up talent from India by offering good salary packages. But things might soon change as Indian companies are now scouting global market to hire employee. One such company is Infosys which is spending $100 million over the next year to train 25,000 overseas workers and college graduates, targeting in particular those from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Many Indian companies are opening offshore offices and recruiting the local staff. Also, labor shortage in India is forcing companies to look elsewhere. Indian companies have come a long way from just being back office outsourcing firms. Now they process into areas such as design, research and development, and sophisticated business applications that require highly skilled workers.

For many years, U.S. companies have hired people from India but now caps on number of visas for foreign professionals have caused delays in processing applications and has forced Indian companies to develop another strategy for its offshore branches. "They said, 'Let us train people in the U.S. or India and make them an extension of our offshore team, in the U.S.' So, Americans are now becoming the offshore component for foreign firms," says Gary David, an associate professor of sociology at Bentley College, Boston.

Right now, more than 10,000 American expatriates work in India for Indian information technology consulting and other outsourcing firms, a number that is expected to grow, says John McCarthy, vice-president of Asia Pacific research at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He estimates that U.S. employers will move 3.4 million jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas by 2017.

U.S. firms seek to cut costs while Indian firms Infosys and TCS are scouting for highly skilled talent outside India, and they say they will pay the local going rate. "We're hoping to bring a different kind of diversity to our workplace. For us, diversity is a way to encourage innovation," said Bikramjit Maitra, Head of Human Resources at Infosys. Since India has become a centre for computer science, firms can teach new employees in India, where there is state-of-the-art training, says Surya Kant, President of TCS America.

Analysts from Gartner, based in Connecticut, say that outsourcing of IT jobs from the U.S. and Europe to developing countries will increase to 30 percent by 2015, up from less than 5 percent currently.