About 50 countries around the world are watching India’s outsourcing success with envy and purpose, weighing how they can get a piece of the pie.

From Canada to China, Brazil to Bangladesh, there are countries-in-waiting across the globe, vying to replicate India’s success story by using what most of these other nations also have in abundance — manpower resource.

“India has been a great avenue for job creation in the past few years, and that too with very little fixed capital investment. This success has not gone unnoticed around the world, especially among the countries which also have their people as their greatest asset,” said Partha Iyengar of Gartner.

“They now want to follow India’s example. In fact, we are closely tracking about 50 such countries that have been slotted into the categories of early entrants, emerging contenders, leaders and challengers.”

Nasscom president Kiran Karnik agrees: “We get a foreign delegation almost every month, especially from countries like China, Vietnam and the Philippines, wanting to study the off-shoring phenomenon in India.”

Forrester Research recently estimated that about 3.3 million American jobs would be moved to other countries by 2015. Another study showed that offshore business has grown by almost 40 per cent in the last two years, with more than half the Fortune 500 companies developing business software in foreign countries.

While in some countries it is the government taking the initiative, approaching consultancy firms like Gartner, KPMG and McKinsey to develop back office plans for them, in others like Vietnam, it is Nasscom-like industry groups that have taken up the job.

... contd.