--- ORLANDO, Fla. The political turmoil that roiled India last week is unlikely to discourage the offshoring of U.S. computer jobs to India, according to many industry experts attending a high-tech conference here.

“Foreign direct investment is extremely critical for the growth of the (Indian) economy,” said Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, an Indian executive with Cognizant Technology Solutions. The software company is based in Teaneck, N.J., but performs about 70 percent of its work in India.

Ramamoorthy said that the information technology work being sent to India is creating so much wealth there that “support for the I.T. industry has been nearly identical” among the leading political parties.

“From an offshoring perspective, India doesn’t have anything to lose,” said Shreyas Sadalgi, who left India five years ago and now is the principal software engineer at Tacit Networks Inc., based in South Plainfield, N.J. The shift of U.S. computing work to India “is only going to make more jobs, so they aren’t going to do anything to stop that,” Sadalgi said.

In recent years, advances in telecommunications and high-speed Internet connections have allowed U.S. employers to send sophisticated service work to low-wage countries, particularly India.

Much of the work involves computer programming, radiology, architecture, legal services and tax preparation.

Tech executives and workers from the United States and India are attending the GigaWorld IT Forum conference here, sponsored by Forrester Research Inc., a technology trend analysis firm based in Cambridge, MA. Forrester vice president Stephanie Moore said that so far, U.S. companies with operations in India are not making any plans to back away.

“In the short term, we really don’t think there will be much of a negative impact” on U.S. companies using Indian labor, she said.

That’s because they believe “it would be very difficult for the new government to roll back the changes” that have encouraged offshoring, Moore said.

“I don’t foresee them changing things because too many people are making money,” she said, “and the Indians are educating more people than ever” who are going to want to work for U.S. employers.

(By Permission, The New York Times)