Software Pros Cool To German Offer
THE GERMAN government's decision to open doors to a large number of Indian software professionals has created a stir here with many even terming the decision as "development aid in reverse," media reports said here.
The decision to give green cards to 20,000 non-EU software professionals in one year for a limited three to five year period has triggered a debate on whether Germany should import foreign talent even as local media reports appeared to indicate a lukewarm response in India.
But the popularity of Indian experts can be gauged by the fact that Wipro's Azim Premzi and Infosys' N. Naryan Murthy are being hailed in Germany as India's "new Maharajas". "The gurus of the cyberspace have revolutionised the whole Indian economy and they are about to create a different image of the backward country to the world: away from the spinning wheel and oriented towards the software - Bill Gates instead of Mahatma Gandhi," observed Germany's prestigious "Der Spiegel" weekly magazine.
The magazine, in a detailed article on India's computer software industry, highlighting the prowess of its professionals likened Germany's decision as development aid the other way round. Germany is India's second biggest aid donor after Japan.
But making a specific reference to software experts from Bangalore, media commentators here have noted that they (Indian software professionals) do not "dream" about jobs in Germany, but of running their own private businesses.
"As much as we feel honoured by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's offer to delegate software experts to Berlin, the German salaries do not not seem to be an incentive to change for a programmer at Infosys," Murthy was quoted as having said in the "Der Spiegel". Analysts while noting that Schroeder wanted to attract Indians to fuel a "techwunder" (technological revolution) in Germany wondered whether computer experts would fall for the bait when there is a five-year limit on the green cards.
While a couple of hundred queries were reported to have been received by the German consulates in the first two weeks after the proposal was mooted, a German embassy employee in New Delhi has been quoted by the newspaper as saying "one can't exactly claim that the applicants are fighting for visas".
"Who of this calibre would move without the right to stay?," asked a German journalist, Christine Brinck. Noting that computer experts would like to be in Silicon valley in the US, where English is spoken rather than somewhere like Munich, she said another problem was the restrictive laws that prevented an entrepreneur from building offices or worskhops in his garage or even in his private apartment.