In the India-inspired film The Darjeeling Limited, the main characters are stranded in the desert. When it comes to IT, however, the professional landscape is anything but barren. With one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, India is keen to attract foreign expertise, while global firms see it as a hub of talent.

Take Infosys, the IT services firm that set up a training centre for 5,000 graduates in Mysore, three hours from Bangalore. This year, 25 graduates from the UK were chosen to join the global talent programme, a six-month intensive course giving trainee software engineers programming basics. Marco Cullen is one of them. He studied electrical engineering at King’s College, London, and says that Infosys’s global outlook “really appealed”. Graduates come from diverse backgrounds, including psychology and biology.

“They teach us to be generalists,” Cullen says. “The industry is moving so quickly, by the time you go on your first project you could be using a different [programming] language.” The firm was started in Pune, in Maharashtra, and is still more than 90 per cent Indian. “You spot common approaches, but it’s a different business culture; it can be quite chaotic. You can’t get that experience reading a book.” He may return to work in India. “I don’t think they’ll have a problem attracting talent.”

At the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the big IT firms are always on campus. Professor Subash Babu reels off a roll call of familiar names: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco. IT companies based in India and overseas visit to recruit. “They say our students are quick learners, analytical and perhaps more productive,” he says, and opportunities are multiplying. “Companies are trying to raise their presence here. There are quite a few Indian professionals heading IT multinationals. We are seeing a new trend in foreigners taking up positions in Indian divisions.”

Meanwhile, Ritika Wattan, a senior IT consultant with Tata Consulting Services (TCS), an offshoot of the steel giant Tata, may return to India at some point but is still enjoying life in the UK. She came from Delhi, did an MBA in India and worked for TCS for two years before coming to the UK. “IT is a very dynamic sector [with] good potential for young people; you learn a lot working with other nationalities.” She is helping to transform the business processes for a large utility company and says that international exposure is essential in consulting. “You interact with customers in different cultures and industries.” She is excited by the opportunities. “So many students and professionals from all over the world are going to India because the market is so different and challenging.”

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