India's outsourcing bubble is bursting By Saritha Rai, silicon.com
Bangalore, India--Once a high-flying tech hub, Bangalore is seeing more sober days in the wake of the credit crisis.
It looks like the global economic turmoil and the dramatic Wall Street meltdown is beginning to hit Bangalore.
Until recently, in India's outsourcing hub it used to be one big Googlefest, with all the pampering and cosseting that employees enjoy at the company's Googleplex headquarters in Silicon Valley. I don't know what the latest from Googleplex is. But in Bangalore, it sure looks like the party is slowing down.
The first sign is in real estate. In a city where residential communities like Silver Manor, Golden Enclave and Platinum City sprouted to house thousands of young, upwardly mobile technology workers, instead of 200 million-rupee homes, developers are now beginning to market 2 million-rupee condominiums.
Departmental stores sport 'sale' signs every other week as credit-card-happy tech workers are cooling off consumption. In India's top management schools, including the Bangalore branch of the Indian Institute of Management, technology outsourcing firms, multinationals and Wall Street banks used to slug it out for Day Zero spots during Placement Week. For students in the graduating class, that exercise is months away. But the schools are already planning to offset an expected slowdown in placements by inviting more companies.
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