Call center executives at work in their office in Bangalore. (Photo: AFP)

Even as the specter of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India’s vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised.

“For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far,” said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. Indian programmers’ “depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough,” the executive said.

If it sounds like “Made in the USA” jingoism, consider this: The entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is himself Indian. He was born and raised near Bombay and received his master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in the city now known as Mumbai. Kurande is not alone in his views on “outsourcing” technology work to India. As more companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India’s ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies –– ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India –– are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.

For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs. “Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced –– what can be set down as a set of rules,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight in Waltham, Mass. “That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance.”

Another Indian executive in the United States who has soured on outsourcing is Dev Ittycheria, the chief executive of Bladelogic, a designer of network management software with 70 workers.

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Bladelogic, whose client list includes General Electric and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out –– one to install an operating system across a network, and another to keep tabs on changes done to the system –– could be done faster and at a lower cost in the United States.

Bladelogic’s chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated in India, predicts that once the “hype cycle” about Indian outsourcing runs its course, projects will come back to the United States “when people find that their productivity goals have not been met.”

The upshot is that high technology corporations are likely to ship more and more business functions to India to take advantage of its well-trained work force. However, even as they do so they will keep many key tasks here.

For instance, Storability Software, which designs systems to manage data storage and has 25 employees in the United States, first tried to outsource some core programming tasks to a big software contractor in India. When that didn’t work, it tried a more specialized boutique. When this firm didn’t deliver up to Storability’s specifications either, the company hired four programmers in the United States to help rewrite the code.

But Storability also stuck to India, setting up its own small shop in Pune late last year, where its 25 programmers perform non-core tasks. “We essentially realigned our motivations,” Kurande said. “We were able to figure out areas of our engineering that suited them.”

The Indian entrepreneurs in this country –– business executives with the cultural affinity and local connections that might be most conducive to making offshore partnerships work –– do not fault the work ethic of the programmers in India. But they say the geographic distance and the differences in business contexts can be difficult to bridge. (Executives at Bladelogic, Storability and Connecterra declined to divulge the names of the companies they have worked with in India, saying that it might damage potential business relationships for other work in the future.)

A typical challenge is the difficulty of finding programmers overseas that can go beyond implementing well-known procedures to the next steps of identifying problems and creating new solutions.

For instance, ConnecTerra, a Cambridge, Mass., company that designs software to manage data from electronic devices such as new radar-based ID tags that companies can use to track inventory, tried programmers in India last year. But ConnecTerra, which has 30 employees in the United States, ultimately gave up on outsourcing because the Indian firm that it worked with couldn’t deal with the fast-changing requirements.

Murali Menon, an Indian-born executive who, as ConnecTerra’s vice president for engineering at the time, dealt with the recruitment of the Indian company. He said the Indian programmers required more detailed instructions to write the software code than would a programmer here, who would be more familiar with the customer’s needs. This slowed the process, which was a major drawback because this technology is new and changing very fast. Ultimately, the product that the Indian programmers delivered was unwieldy, with software code written in one big chunk rather than more flexible modules that top programmers use now.

No one questions the dedication of Indian programmers. “They worked hard,” Menon said of the programmers in India, “but couldn’t keep up.”

In the end, many say the advantages of keeping some of the most sophisticated work in the United States are related to the factors that draw technology entrepreneurs from India and elsewhere to this country in the first place: Indian engineers and software designers in this country know that the businesses whose needs are driving technological innovation are mostly in the United States. It comes down to being where the customers are.

Speaking in defense of the programming industry in India is Bassab Pradhan, the senior vice president of worldwide sales for Infosys Technologies. Infosys, based in Bangalore, is India’s largest software services company. Of its revenue of $1.06 billion last year about two-thirds came from American corporate clients including Visa, Boeing and Cisco Systems for which it provides services like data entry, programming and customer technical support.

Pradhan, who is Indian educated, disagrees with critics who say that Indian-trained workers lack creative ability. When outsourcing fails, he said, it is typically because “less disciplined” businesses try to farm out projects that are not properly defined.

(By Permission, The New York Times)