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100,000 students enroll in mechanical, civil and chemical engineering programs. (Different sources give varying totals for the number of colleges in the system, but the number always exceeds 1,000.)

"The total number of engineering students in all four years of college is over a million at any time," Phatak said. "So you see, this is our problem, and this is our opportunity."

A prolific source of this educational bounty is Karnataka, the state where Bangalore and a large percentage of the IT industry is located. There, 130 colleges produce 30,000 graduates in the field each year, said M.K. Shankaralinge Gowda, the state's secretary of the department of information technology.

That translates to jobs. Since 1997, the number of technology professionals employed in the state has risen more than tenfold, from 25,000 to 285,000, Gowda said. In all of India, the number of software and service workers rose from 522,000 at the end of 2001 to 813,000 last year, according to NASSCOM.

While most students focus on software, chip design is growing. Five years ago, the Indian Institute of Technology set up a chip design program and a semiconductor lab that graduates 20 students a year. The university is replicating it at other institutions, according to Sunil Sherlekar, head of embedded systems at Tata Consultancy Services.

Large U.S. chipmakers have set up design centers in the country. Intel is designing a server chip at its Bangalore facility, said Ketan Sampat, president of Intel India.

"Quality" not just a slogan
For India's services companies, fast hiring and high turnover are significant competitive concerns. To avoid wasting time between projects, service companies must be able to move teams of employees from one project to another rapidly, Batni and others say. "Quality" and "customer satisfaction" are viewed as more than empty slogans; they are measured quantities that affect profitability and growth.

Achieving these goals requires rigorous employee training. At Tata, newly hired college graduates sit through 52 days of training. Among other assignments, they have to read excerpts of novels such as "Gone with the Wind" and then conduct a group discussion in front of a class.

"India is a very competitive world. It is heavy on the 'I,'" said Nagaraj Ijari, the delivery center head of Tata's offices here. "We change it to a 'we.'"

Yet it is a habit that is difficult to shake, especially in a society that stresses individual achievement from an early age. The competitive nature of the technology field is reflected in a contest sponsored by Tata for 13- and 14-year-olds in Karnataka. More than 60,000 teenagers participated in the contest, which awards prizes to those most adept at answering questions about the history or products of different technology companies.

After 10th grade, students must declare their collegiate paths and endure strenuous board examinations. Schools take out full-page ads in newspapers to congratulate students who score in the 90-plus percentiles.

Not surprisingly, the college admissions process is rife with anxiety. The seven campuses of the Indian Institute of Technology receive more than 150,000 applications a year and admit around 3,500 undergraduate and graduate students.

During the five-year curriculum, "you're as good as in a prison," said M.T. Karunakaran, president of Telsima Communications and an IIT alumnus. One week, students might work on engineering theory, he said; the next, they might be asked to learn how to weld.

The Indian Institute of Science is similarly stringent. The graduate school receives more than 100,000 applications and accepts only a few hundred--an acceptance rate of 0.3 percent.

The long odds then continue when it comes time to get a job. Infosys receives a million employment applications annually. The 10,000 hired represent only 1 percent of the applicant pool.

To stand out, job candidates will often fashion resumes five or six pages long. "It might include the elocution contest that they won in grade school or what they did in the Boy Scouts," said Supratim Sarkar, manager of strategic marketing at Wipro Technologies.

Jessie Paul, head of marketing at iGate, a services and consulting firm, said a bank teller once told her that his granddaughter was looking for a job. Later that night, she got a call from him at home. "He got my phone number from a loan application," she said.

But the hard work pays off for those employees who do get hired and eventually establish themselves. Then, they are exposed to a very different kind of competition--one that casts them as the object of pursuit.

"The real issue here is the growth in the salary levels. The salaries in India are still growing at 18 to 20 percent annum," said Sanjay Nayak, CEO of Tejas Networks. "The stickiness of people to companies is very low. A little bit more stabilization is needed."