"We're planning to expand our activities in China," NIIT Chairman Rajendra S Pawar announced here on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his company. Pawar, who had visited China eight times, said he was "very impressed" by the diligence and mathematics ability of the Chinese students.

Founded on December 2, 1981, the NIIT has since become a hot attraction for Indian youngsters longing for a career in the IT sector. Engaged in both software development and computer education, the NIIT now operates in 38 countries across the world.

According to Suren Singh Rasaily, head of education and training business of the company, the NIIT first introduced its computer training program to China in March 1997 as part of efforts to start software development projects, mainly outsourcing projects, in China.

"We found that Chinese programmers were very talented, very hard-working and highly disciplined, and that the cost of doing software projects in China would be lower than in India," said Rasaily.

However, many Chinese IT professionals, though possessing excellent mathematics, engineering and science background and blessed with impressive logic orientation, often lack proper training in software development. Most of them also lack experience of working in large software projects and hardly have any knowledge about project management, Rasaily commented.

"Therefore, we had come up with the idea that we should first take our education programs to China to train people before starting our software projects there," he noted. Actually, many believe the NIIT has gained fame in India for its successful blending of theories and practical skills in IT training.

The first NIIT training center was opened in China's most famous commercial street, the Nanjing Road, in the country's largest city Shanghai. Due to government restrictions on foreign and private investment in the education sector, the center was made a cooperative project between the NIIT and the Continued Education Center of Shanghai's Pudong New Development Area (PCEC). All teachers were local recruits who were sent to India for necessary training.

The center became an immediate success, with its training capacity of 1,000 students quickly taken to the full. Most of the trainees, instead of becoming future NIIT employees, easily found a job with IT giants like IBM and Microsoft. As Shanghai decided to build a first-rate software park in the Pudong area, two more PCEC-NIIT centers were set up to meet the surging demand for IT personnel.

Only one thing slightly took Rasaily by surprise: Chinese students seemed to be equally enthusiastic about IT expertise and the English language. An NIIT textbook in mandarin, which took nearly four months to translate from English and cost the company quite a sum, was rejected by most Chinese students, who strongly asked for a bilingual textbook as well as bilingual teaching.

"Now our textbook in China was printed with one page in English and the other in Chinese, so that the students could learn both computer and English," said Rasaily.

In September 2000, the Chinese government, after a three-year observation and consideration, allowed the NIIT to set up wholly foreign-funded educational institutes in China, which means the company could now set up centers anywhere in the country with any partners, Rasaily said with pride and excitement.

In a stunning rapid pace, the NIIT had opened 27 new centers in Beijing, Guangzhou and neighboring areas of Shanghai within the past six months, most of them starting functioning between September and November, he noted.

"Our goal is to have at least 100 centers across China by the end of next year," he stated.

The company had also reached agreements with three Chinese universities, namely the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing, Tianjin University in Tianjin and Jiaotong University in Shanghai, to set up training centers on their campus, he added.

With classrooms and computer facilities already in existence and a highly qualified faculty, who only needed to be retrained on NIIT curriculums and software, these on-campus centers would have much lower training cost than ordinary ones, he explained.

As the first three centers are expected to be in place by March 2002, the NIIT plans to cooperate with one or two best universities in every Chinese province for such centers in the near future.

Although the NIIT had spent about 10 million U.S. dollars on its China operation and had so far been making losses, Rasaily believed it would turn out to be a profitable long-term investment.

While the training program is expected to start making profit in about five years, the large labor force trained during this period will become valuable assets to NIIT business in China, he said.

The NIIT sees a lot of opportunities of local business in China, where so many enterprises in various development zones need software support, and many international clients, such as the Japanese, also feel more comfortable if the work is done in nearby China than in faraway India, he noted.

Claiming that he didn't see any major local competition, Rasaily conceded that NIIT training centers in China were facing challenges from foreign IT training companies and even Indian counterparts. Some of them, like the U.S. Microsoft, had landed in China earlier than the NIIT.

But he quickly expressed confidence that the NIIT had its advantage for being able to "provide better quality at lower cost".

Citing the example that over 14,000 people swarmed in for the admission test when a new NIIT center opened somewhere in China, he asserted: "I think so far the response is quite good."

(People?s Daily December 3, 2001)