Good Times for Grads

Good Times for Grads
Happy times are here again for MBA and engineering graduates in India (India's Top Recruiters, BT cover, June 13). While students of B-schools and engineering colleges in America and Europe worry about job offers being yanked and salaries and starting bonuses shrinking, their counterparts in India are having what looks to be a bright recruiting year.

- Vineet Achyut, Delhi

Hiring Demand Picks Up
Jobs and salaries for this year's graduates are up sharply, thanks to an increasing need for high-quality managers and technical professionals to run the nation's growing businesses. As your cover story shows, much of the demand is coming from those traditional stalwarts of campus hiring-IT, telecoms, construction, banks and PSUs, consumer goods companies.... Also fuelling the recruiting drive is the addition of several high-profile financial services and consulting firms, including global firms as well as many Indian recruiters seeking to shore up talent for their overseas operations.

- Neeraj Thakur, Pune

More Equal than Others
Grads of top schools are always spoilt for choice as seen from the scramble among star recruiters to grab Day zero or Day one slot during placement season. As students here opt only for companies that offer them the maximum value proposition in terms of career and compensation, the placement game at these institutes is one in which the recruiter is just a player and not a referee.

- Shashi Shekhar, Bangalore

Superior Software
Office Reloaded (BT, May 30) brings out the superior aspects of Microsoft's Office 2010. Features like collaborative authoring, mobile connectivity, photo/video editing, broadcasting, video trimming and web applications are nifty valueadditions and make Microsoft's latest Office package an invaluable bundle of software. But I am sceptical about its availability, affordablity and the scope for its utility in Indian context.

- B. Rajasekaran, Bangalore

Prometheus Bound
India has not demonstrated any breakthrough innovations in technology, science and medicine in spite of producing some of the brightest minds in these fields (Innovation, BT cover, May 30). One reason could be the absence of deep financial markets that facilitate the flow of money into tech start-ups.

Our per capita venture capital inflow is just $0.75 as compared to USA's $100 and Israel's $250 and our civilian R&D expenditure is 0.09 per cent of the GDP compared to Israel's 4.5 per cent. We score poorly on another indicator of inventiveness-patent filings.

Only 35,000 patents were filed in India in 2007 in contrast to 456,154 patent applications in the US that year. But one out of 10 US patents in 2006 had an owner or co-owner with an Indian name, which goes to prove that Indians can be innovative given the right ecosystem.

- Vineet Madhukar, Delhi