Cisco, Silicon Valley's largest company, has massively accelerated its Indian expansion drive, planning to train to 360,000 engineers in the country to deploy its technologies by 2013. It would be a sixfold increase.

The IT hardware giant, which last year opened a new campus in Bangalore as part of a $1 billion Indian investment strategy, makes the lion's share of its profits from routers and switches, the hardware that forms the backbone of the internet and of corporate computer systems.

Cisco predicts that increased use of the web, especially for video applications, will require a multi-billion-dollar scheme of upgrades to the world's current online infrastructure - plus a vastly expanded pool of trained labour to install them.

A series of new ventures designed to dramatically boost the number of Indians certified to roll-out Cisco products will include a new fleet of mobile training and testing centres that will patrol India's rural outreaches. The company also plans to increase its direct workforce in the county more than threefold, to 10,000, by 2010.

The investments look to be a vote of confidence in the Indian IT sector at a time of mounting uncertainty.

India's IT cost advantages, in particular, have come under scrutiny in the wake of the rupee's sharp appreciation. The currency has gained about 12 per cent against the dollar in the past year, piling pressure on the margins of India's outsourcing companies.

In the past week, two of India's largest IT employers have let hundreds of underperforming staff go in the latest sign that sentiment has softened. Tata Consultancy Services, which had already cut its bonus pay rates for the first time this month, axed about 500 workers while IBM is thought to have culled about 700.

Against this background, Cisco's plans to train a new generation of Indian engineers yesterday drew fire from their prospective Western peers, who suggested the drive to train Indian graduates would ultimately lead to a flood of labour into developed economies.

One person wrote on a comments board on an online industry publication. "360,000 Indian Network specialists soon to deluge the US market."

"I can see the lobbying – 'America isn't producing enough network specialists, so we need these folks to keep the economy going'."

To match its training targets, Cisco said it would add 150 new exam centres across India in conjunction with Pearson VUE, the testing group.

Cisco also recuited two of India's largest technology training organisations – the National Institute of Information Technology(NIIT) and Indian Institute of Hardware Technology (IIHT) – as accredited partners, to help feed the demand for engineers.

According to IDC, the researchers, India's economic growth will fuel demand for 130,000 extra network engineers in the next three years.

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