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Indian IT companies attempting to come to terms with the worsening financial crisis in the US may well move to overturn their most successful business model.

In February, I attended Map World Forum. As a side trip to the conference, we visited Infotech Enterprises Limited. Worldwide, it employs over 7900 people in 27 locations. Although many customers are secretive about using Infotech the client base is known to include major players in telecoms, utilities and government.

Founded by IT entrepreneur B.V.R.Mohan Reddy, the 17 year old company has global revenue exceeding US $167 million and is on track to break US $200 million this year. Reddy and his family retain a major shareholding in the company but United Technology Corporations’ investment arm Carrier International Mauritius, Tele Atlas and venture capital company General Alliance Partners also have a significant shareholding.

The company has two divisions: one provides engineering services, the other, geospatial information services. The latter specialises in various categories of spatial and telecoms engineering, road data, photogrammetry and software development.

During our visit, we saw an entire section (maybe a hundred workstations) devoted to updating road maps for Tele Atlas. Operators use the imagery obtained by camera-equipped vans to annotate a database with information they pick up from street signs, such as speed restrictions, or to create lists of points of interest.

In another section, staff were working on creating a database for a Swiss telecoms company. They enter maps and circuit diagrams of the network into a database, from which logical connection diagrams, geographically accurate asset management systems and customer relationship systems will be built.

The photogrammetry sector is smaller than the other two, but no less productive. Massive amounts of imagery are imported into the system from the client, orthorectified and mosaiced more or less automatically. The imagery is being flown with 60 per cent overlap and the software is able to recognise common points in two adjacent images and tie them together.

In the survey that we saw, which had been flown in the Middle East, ground control points were available and the imagery was tied to that as well.

However, image classification is still a fully manual process. Vectors were being drawn to define building outlines, roads and other points of interest.

This data can then be used to create three dimensional models of city centres. Infotech is now in the process of building 3D models of hundreds of urban cores for a US client.

For Infotech, and for dozens of other Indian companies, this has been a very successful business model. Starting from nothing 20 years ago, the Indians now dominate global IT. They employ cheap but highly skilled talent to provide solutions to industries in the West.

Many in the West have been critical of this, arguing that Indians are stealing their jobs. The simple truth of the matter is that there are no jobs in India for people from a developed nation.

You cannot, as the Hyderabadi routinely do, digitise an entire national road map-base, using highly paid workers. Even if you could get hold of 200-300 people with the requisite skill level prepared to work on low wages, you still could not produce a map product for a price consumers in a developed nation would be prepared to pay.

Automation may change this, but not soon.

The problem we face is not that Indians are prepared to do this work for a tenth of the price of their overseas colleagues, but rather that they might refuse to continue to do so.

No one knows how bad the global financial meltdown might get, but everyone is prepared for the worst. In particular, Indian executives are well aware that the nation's prized IT sector is far too overexposed to the US economy.

More than 90 per cent of the GIS work done in India is exported, mostly to the US. This must change. India must create a GIS marketplace in India itself, and do it soon.

There is plenty of work to be done; it would be quite easy for India to absorb all its GIS professionals, given the right mix of public investment and bureaucratic will.

Which leaves one to ponder: who will be digitising national road bases in another 20 years time?

ASM Newsletter is distributed by e-mail every week. It reports on events in the spatial industry in Asia and events outside the region which will impact on Asia.