PUNE, MARCH 22 : 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.

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.