Accenture, the global consulting giant, has its worldwide head of business-process outsourcing in Bangalore; by December, it expects to have more employees in India than in the US.

This is not a zero-sum game, in which every job added in India comes at the expense of an American or European one. In many ways, the shift reflects a changing view at multinational companies as they find it easier to meet growing demand by taking advantage of the improved skills of newly educated people in the developing world. And some companies are returning certain jobs to the US, finding that the work in India and elsewhere is not up to snuff.

But there are trade-offs as well. As Indian back offices become more sophisticated, Western companies are finding that large parts of their work, even high-end tasks, can also be done from India. From the consumer perspective, India has emerged as a pool of 1.1 billion potential customers for companies seeking faster growth. And so many companies are shifting their energy to where they see their futures being written.

“India is at the epicentre of the flat world,” said Michael J Cannon-Brookes, vice president for business development in India and China at IBM, which has reduced its American work force by 31,000 since 1992 even as its Indian staff mushroomed to 52,000 from zero. “It’s one of the world’s two biggest pools of high-value skills, which we want to leverage both to help clients in the domestic marketplace and to help clients globally,” he said. “The two play off each other.”

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