The Great India Gold Rush Continues…
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Emily Hueske, an American neuroscientist working in India, takes in the Taj Mahal with boyfriend Nathan Wilson.
Simonsen got his M.B.A. at New York University, but the 28-year-old decided to go half a world away for his internship. He chose Copal Partners, a small technology company near New Delhi over similar companies on the East Coast and in Silicon Valley. “I was drawn to India because while U.S. markets are stagnating, so much is happening here,” he explains. “It’s a chance to re-experience the dotcom environment of the 1990s. Companies are growing so quickly here that opportunities to take on responsibility are greater.”
Simonsen is at the leading edge of an increasing number of science, business and technology students from elite colleges and universities heading to India, the world’s third-largest economy, to get global experience. “Internships have become a big deal in the last five years and India is particularly attractive because of its huge language advantage,” says George Day, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “We can’t just drop students into Chinaâ€â€?there’s a language problem,” says Day. “China is the big engine, but India is the place to ride the curve upward.â€?
Universities are responding to the demand for international experience, particularly in emerging Asian markets. Last summer, Yale president Richard Levin took a 12-member team to set up joint ventures with several Indian universities. The Ivy League school will send 30 interns over this year and expects to send 50 next year. It also has 30 faculty collaboration projects underway in a number of subjects ranging from public health, to management and forestry. And this year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s India program, funded by the National Science Foundation, flew over 28 Ph.D.s to pursue their research in science and economics. “MIT sends students because it’s aware of our globalized world,” says coordinator Deepti Nijhawan. “But it’s a leap of faith.”
As of last week, that leap looked a lot less risky. Within days of each other, tech industry giants Microsoft and Intel announced unprecedented investments in their Indian research and development facilities. On Dec. 7, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that he was putting $1.7 billion into the company’s operations in India over four years. About half of that amount will go to its research and development center in Hyderabadâ€â€?Microsoft’s largest campus outside its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. “India has emerged as the new mecca for high-technology investments,” said Gates at the opening of a sleek new facility in India’s IT capital of Bangalore. A few days before Gates’s trip, Silicon Valley chip maker Intel’s chairman Craig Barrett announced that his company was investing $1.1 billion in India. And in October, Cisco Systems Inc. announced that it would put more than $1 billion into India over three yearsâ€â€?its largest non-U.S. investment ever. A good chunk of that money, like Microsoft’s investment, is going for the kind of innovative work that attracts world-class grad researchers and engineers, rather than the low-level call center jobs stereotypically outsourced to India.
Read: India, Inc.
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