August 6, 2003 – India enjoys a healthy mind- and market share for its outsourced services business, but some analysts think the country’s IT industry needs a new fix.

“India’s growth is being limited by one drug and that is the service drug,” according to Tushar Dave, managing director of New Path Ventures LLC, which develops semiconductor design and software companies. With its large, talented, and inexpensive labor pool, India must encourage its IT companies to dive into new technology markets, such as designing semiconductor chips and software, he said, as quoted in the Agence France-Presse.

Also leading the call for change is Vinod Dham, co-founder of New Path Ventures and leader of Intel’s Pentium team in the early 1990s. India must learn to “deliver a solution to the world instead of being told to deliver a particular solution,” Dham told attendees at a recent business conference on the semiconductor industry in Bangalore. “India’s silicon industry is in the same stage as when Y2K transformed the software industry,” he said.

With Intel and other chip companies currently increasing investments in India, Dham believes that “in another five years there will be more chip heads than software geeks in Bangalore.”