Shortage of expertise curbs India's R&D ambitions

By Sayantani Ghosh (Reuters) - As India's dream of moving up the value chain in the tech industry is slowly realized, its giant bite into the research and development apple has led to some teething troubles.

An English-speaking population and a job-hungry country -- once enticements enough to attract outsourcing to India -- are no longer adequate as local arms of tech multinationals crank up R&D operations.

Coupled with these challenges, expertise that is barely a decade old is limiting the scope of development of cutting-edge technology from India.

"If you look at experienced talent, the people who have spent 15, 20, 25 years in product development, that bench is still thin in India," said Noshir Kaka, director at McKinsey & Co, a global consultancy firm.

While the talent pool is large, the absolute value of the engineers in the pool is low -- lower than China, for example, Kaka said.

The job-hopping tendency of Indian engineers is another stumbling block in the path of gaining deeper technical knowledge, said Rick Steffens, head of Hewlett Packard Co's (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) systems technology and software division.

"We have to make it attractive for engineers to stay with that technology longer, not jumping around from program to program or company to company every couple of years," Steffens said.

From a research point of view, India's talent supply is poor, said Guruduth Banavar, head of IBM's (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) India Research lab.

"The total output of Ph.D.s in India is probably about the same as that of a single good university in the U.S.," he said. "The supply is poor and the demand has been going up even at the very high ends.