Most Americans or Britons would be hard pressed to name their national call-centre champions or top providers of IT services. In India they are like rock stars, endlessly featured in the media. All Of them claim to be hiring by the thousands every month. New business models come and go. Hero bosses such as Raman Roy, chief executive of Wipro Spectramind and "father of Indian business-process outsourcing" (an industry all of six years old), have developed the same preposterous swagger adopted by erstwhile leaders of America's dotcom boom. Is India heading for a fall, too? India's IT industry is growing at a vertiginous rate. A dozen years ago, the entire country boasted just four or five IBM mainframe computers, says Lakshmi Narayanan, the boss of Cognizant, a big Indian IT-service company. Last year the industry notched up sales of $16 billion, three-quarters of which went abroad, according to NASSCOM, the lobby group. By 2008, says NASSCOM, annual sales are likely to surpass $50 billion. The big firms are hiring about 1,000 graduates a month straight from Indian technical colleges.
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