Indian Silicon Valley just 5 yrs away: Vivek Wadhwa

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 23:59 IST
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Indian Silicon Valley just 5 yrs away: Vivek Wadhwa
Bangalore: Few years back India had just handful of good IT product firms. Today the situation is changing. In five years time there will be Indian companies that are comparable with those in the Silicon Valley of U.S. Vivek Wadhwa Adjunct-Professor at Duke University said that about 25 to 30 percent out of the firms that he met are bringing out world class products. There is no Google coming out of India as yet, but that will happen in the next five years, he adds. The spurt in products is a spillover from services, reports M.A. Arun from The Deccan Herald. People with deep domain experience, from services business are setting up products firms. The new U.S. immigration policies, returnees are another major segment of current breed of Indian entrepreneurs. The country's growth lies ahead and is not limited to IT. In pharmaceutical R&D space only higher molecular level work is done in the U.S. and India is proficient in the rest of the work. In aviation, it is going beyond software strength and designing even first class cabins. The next generation of consumer appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators are coming out of India. To grasp India's strength in technology, compare its advances with China. Indian government has made very little effort to woo R&D business, but multinationals such as Cisco, EMC, IBM and Microsoft are doing high-end work in the country. India is succeeding despite poor infrastructure, security concerns and crippling educational system. The secret recipe of India's success was high workforce development programs followed by major IT services companies. Each one of them has sophisticated recruitment system which runs a battery of psychometric tests to select candidates. They then invest in training employees through out the different phases of their career, says Wadhwa. Despite triggering India's success, the next big thing in the Indian tech will come from smaller product and not larger services firms. His research also shows that 85 percent of Indian students in the U.S. wish to return to India as they feel the company offer them better prospects.

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