Why does India have so many software engineers?

Are Indians inherently good at programming?

Question: Why does India have so many software engineers?
Answer: Because since 1997 the Indian government has been adding engineering schools and colleges in the IT sector. Why? So the Indian governments revenues increase from the export of software.

Welcome to Costs Matter, a series that asks different questions all of which have the same answer: to better manage costs. The costs are frequently economic though not always. The series focuses narrowly on the impact of costs. It does not claim these costs are the sole cause. To read more in the series, visit https://medium.com/galileo-onwards/costs/home.

India’s success in the software industry is a great advertisement for macroeconomic planning.

Rapid History Lesson: Since winning independence in 1947, India has put forth Five Year economic plans describing their broad goals to take the economy forward. Specifically, in their 10th Five Year Plan (2002–2007), the planners decided “India would require 2.2 million IT professionals by 2008”. IT is Information Technology.

1. To reach those 2.2 million, India would need more engineering educational institutions, specifically in IT.
2. Since you cannot force students to choose Information Technology, the planners chose the next best thing. They rigged the game. Point 3 is a direct quote from the 10th Plan.
3. “The curriculum in other branches of engineering should also be reoriented and broad based to include IT subjects.”
4. In other words, all engineering branches would teach IT, so whether students wanted to specialize in it or not, they would learn.

But did India achieve the 2.2 million target? Yes. I collected data from the Statistical Year Book of India 2015 and plotted it in an earlier article. The graph is shown below.

Number of educational institutions plotted by year along with students enrolled per year. Data collected from Statistical Year Book of India 2015 and plotted in Dean’s Doctors….

The number of students enrolling in colleges has increased year on year.

But did India’s costs matter? The answer is present in the graph below.

India’s Software Export Revenues plotted from 1999 to 2017. For sources, see my Dean’s Doctors… (2018)

India’s revenues grew from around ₹58,000 crores in 2005 to over ₹80,000 crores in 2017. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of over 20%.

That’s why India has so many software engineers.

Incidentally, if you want to see all this documented in much greater detail, checkout my 2018 post titled “Dean’s Doctors and India’s Software Engineers”.

Generated by the author. Public domain.