According to The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) around 60,000 Indian IT professionals based in the US may have returned in recent years, with Silicon Valley having been affected the most by this trend

In 2003 TiE had reported that between 15,000 and 20,000 Indians had returned and the trend had continued with about 40,000 having come home in the last four years.

The San Jose-based The Mercury News quoted TiE charter member Vish Mishra, a senior venture partner with Clearstone Ventures, saying the flow of investment capital to India had expanded with many Silicon Valley VC firms emerging as financiers for projects in India.

In the year to August 2006, VC firms invested $2 billion in early and late-stage companies.

A study released earlier this year by Anna-lee Saxenian of the University of California-Berkeley and by Duke University, Indians had founded 15 per cent of all Silicon Valley start-ups and that one-quarter of immigrant-founded engineering and scientific companies set up in the US during the past decade were by Indians.

These companies cumulatively accounted for sales of over $52 billion in sales and created 450,000 jobs.

The San Jose-based paper said that in the US there wasn''t a single major IT firm that hasdn''t set up operations in India. IT companies are attracted by low-cost, highly skilled workforce; 3.5 million white-collar US jobs, along with $151 billion in wages, are expected to be outsourced by 2015, with India as the top outsourcing destination, the paper says quoting a report by Forrester Research.

But these companies also see a market of potentially epic proportions, the paper says. Half of India''s 1.2 billion people are younger than 25 — that''s 600 million people coming into their peak consuming years in an economy.