Jun 13, 2004 by PAUL BEEBE THE GAZETTE
BANGALORE, INDIA - Since its founding 500 years ago, this scrappy city has been called many names that mirror its development: garden city, pub city, fashion capital of India, city of boiling beans.
Today, Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India.
This technopolis of world-class corporations, said to be Asia's fastest-growing city, is where the future of tens of thousands of U.S. workers will be determined.
More than 1,300 foreign and Indian tech businesses have been drawn to Bangalore by cheap labor, highly educated workers and an endless supply of people who speak fluent English.
Add a pro-business government, cheap telephone service and the Internet for a combination that is irresistible to cost-conscious firms rocked by a worldwide economic slowdown.
Shifting jobs overseas to lowwage locations is called outsourcing, and many companies are doing it.
Agilent, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, Quantum -- all U.S. tech corporations, all important Colorado Springs employers, have set up shop in India.
They and other big companies are moving thousands of programming, design, customer support and other jobs overseas to cut costs.
At the same time, Indian technology companies are proliferating -- Wipro, Infosys, Sasken and MphasiS BFL, all aristocrats of corporate India, offer one-stop shopping packages to U.S. companies, ranging from back-office work to software development.
Bangalore's growth is blistering.
Almost 600 multinational and Indian companies have emerged since 1999.
A hiring spree is under way. Infosys will add 10,000 engineers this year. AOL is recruiting. Wipro may hire 9,000. Google is looking, too.
Colorado Springs is reeling while Bangalore is rocking.
Colorado Springs hit a wall when the U.S. economy soured in 2000. Since then, almost 10,000 jobs have disappeared. Most were tech jobs. Of those, 1,300 may have gone overseas, unlikely to return.
The job exodus is sparking intense debate.
How should America respond? Is outsourcing just another word for free trade? Or is the trend a more ominous threat to our standard of living?
The evidence isn't clear.
What is certain is that jobs such as software development and chip design -- once thought to be immune to the trend -- are taking flight.
The outflow shows no sign of stopping.
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