Indian Silicon Valley in 5 years: Vivek Wadhwa Date:   Friday , December 03, 2010 “India will have its own Silicon Valley in five years,” said Vivek Wadhwa an Adjunct-Professor at Duke University. According to Wadhwa from the 250 firms he met this year, 25 to 30 percent are bringing out world-class products. As of now there is no Google coming out of India, but that will happen in the next five years, he added. The spurt in products is a spillover from services. People with deep domain experience from services business are setting up products firms in India and so are the U.S. returnees. The country’s growth is not limited to IT; pharmaceutical R&D space and aviation are fields of strength to India. The country is also playing in the next generation consumer appliances market. Indian government has made very little effort to encourage 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 is high workforce development programs followed by major IT services companies. They have sophisticated recruitment system that involves a series of psychometric tests. They then invest in training employees throughout the different phases of their career, says Wadhwa. He believes that the next big thing in 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 that companies in India offer them better prospects.