So is it time for India to start worrying? Not really, says Iyengar. “There are six specific ingredients that make up an off-shoring success story — a large resource pool of graduates, government support, a strong vendor base, training ecosystem, English language proficiency, and process and quality capability. None of the 50 countries on our radar have all of these, except for India.”

He said a UN and Morgan Stanley study has estimated that in 10 years, India will be adding 83 million people to the global workforce, as compared to half a million from Europe. Japan is going in the negative, he said.

Most of the other countries are leveraging their special advantages, like geographical proximity or linguistic advantage to pitch for off-shore assignments, rather than compete with India. So you have Latin America playing up its Spanish speaking population, Brazil promoting its German pockets and Mauritius doing the same with French.

Sri Lanka is positioning itself as a backup for Indian operations of large firms, while Canada, Mexico and many East European countries are hard-selling the near-shoring angle with distance, time-zone, culture and language advantage.

There is also the specialisation factor with India leading in data processing, telecom and software applications while China is pitching its hardware services, Russia its software engineering and Ireland its packaged software. Despite the competition, India retains its position as the global off-shore leader, Karnik said adding that given China’s ambitions propped on advantages like better infrastructure and unbridled government support, the situation could change.