Cool Bihari: Great Future Opportunity for Bihar

I’d posted about the talent crunch, which the IT industry faces today on my HR FUNDA blog. "India's information technology industry faces a shortfall of 500,000 professionals by 2010 threatening its dominance of global offshore IT-services, warns a report published by business consultancy McKinsey and Nasscom, India's leading IT association.

NYT says “Labour shortages will pose a serious obstacle to India's ability to retain its lead in IT offshoring. The IT industry today employs 1m workers, but on its current growth path, it will need 2.3m IT workers by 2010. A recent report noted that only a quarter of engineering graduates were actually employable in the sector.

India's IT leaders, Infosys Technologies, TCS and Wipro are scaling up their recruitment to about 1,000 young people a month.

A lack of office space in the main IT hubs of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai and the New Delhi region is likely to be another obstacle to India maintaining its lead. The McKinsey report calls for an additional "five Gurgaons" [the call-centre capital of India] and "5-7 Punes" [a mid-size engineering town near Mumbai).

China is today the largest producer of engineering graduates in the world, with some 600,000 passing out of its colleges and universities last year.

As per this Rediff article “According to the All India Council for Technical Education, India produced 401,791 engineers in 2003-04, 35 per cent being computer engineers. In 2004-05, the number of engineering graduates increased to 464,743, of which 31 per cent were computer engineers.

Compared to India and China, the United States produces only 70,000 engineering graduates every year. All of Europe produces just 100,000.

India currently has 113 universities and 2,088 colleges, many of which teach various engineering disciplines. Engineering colleges in the country have been growing at 20 per cent a year, while business schools have grown at 60 per cent.

Five Indian states -- Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala -- account for 69 per cent of India's engineers. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Orissa account for only 14 per cent.

I think Bihar is at the same position where India was some 20 years back. With abundance of Manpower, Bihar has the largest population in the state. The total population of Bihar as at 0:00 hours of 1st March 2001 stood at 82,878,796 as per the provisional results of the Census of India 2001. While all-India decadal growth rate of population is 21.34 %, the population of the Bihar rose by 28.43% between 1991-2001.

With more that 50% of Bihar population in the age group of less than 30 years we are actually on a point where either we can make great strides or the situation will get more chaotic

Some of the things which really augur well for Bihar are:

Despite the decline in overall growth and development we have continued to invest and excel in the field of education. Students of Bihar have traveled miles for even basic college /graduate level education.

We are as a society always committed to academic achievements and results from all national level competitions shows that the performance of Bihar students is remarkable despite the obvious shortages on infrastructure front.

Lets just hope that we are able to tap this potential and change the fortunes of Bihar .If India has to challenge and retain its competitive advantage in the field of IT in the days to come it's time Bihar plays a critical role in having a pool of competent Trained Manpower Resource, which is able to not only fill the required positions but also helps in changing the fortunes of the country and State.
We are also seeing the growth of small tier -II cities and towns scaling upto the global requirements.The increased demand and pressure on existing Urban cities means that we have to develope small centres of excellence.
Given the nature of IT industry which is not geography centric(it's a flat world) but based on talent availability and cost ,I think we just need a small momentum to shape the future.Senior professionals in the Industry feel that we really need to tap the existing manpower in these states.