The Indian IT industry is becoming more data-centric with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine language disrupting the industry as a whole. Along with these changes, the role of data scientist has also become a glamorous one with high-paying salaries and promising future ahead. With Indian analytics market estimated to grow by $2.71 billion annually in revenues, there is a tremendous rush to solidify their seats before it is late.

Due to this promising future and availability of local talents at a lucrative rate, the Indian IT industry has always been a gold mine for international tech giants. With the country being at the cusp of AI crossroad and with key industry players looking at means to integrate the technology to their working, the country has once again turned itself into a fine ground for research and development.

With emerging markets like India forecasted to contribute up to 55% to global GDP, the latest trend among tech giants has been to establish their Centres of Excellence (CoE) in India. This has been helping these tech giants to be a part of the next wave of the growth by understanding its complex market, talent context and evolving regulatory environment.

Some of the biggest names include IBM India, Microsoft and Google, who have set up their CoEs and have already partnered with numerous government and private agencies to drive the next wave of technology. The latest players in the field include American technology provider for companies, Ecolab and Latin-American departmental store chain Fabella.

Previously, these companies looked for international talents to manage and oversee the operations in India. But lately, there has been an inverse in this trend with the appointment of Indian talents to monitor the organisational working in India and their offshore offices.  

How Well Has Indian Data Scientist Fared?

While brain-drain continues to be a challenge that India currently face, with the country losing the majority of its talent to western countries. A number of Indian companies and their multinationals counterparts have started to rely on their internal pool of Indian talents to lead the team.

Increasingly, as more and more offshore offices of the Indian companies continues to mushroom across the globe, regional players are attempting to compete with their international companies and scale-up their operations with their international expansion. Some of the key players who continue to battle it out in this heavily competitive field include the likes of Infosys, HCL and Wipro. Interestingly, the Indian analytics industry currently services almost $1.7 billion in revenue to just US firms.

While their responsibilities range from CEO to principal data scientist depending on the organisation, over the years more data scientists have been breaking away from traditional career path to embrace diverse leadership roles.

Another interesting trend regarding the industry is the growing number of reverse migration of the techies to India. Globally, a lot of Ivy league and other premium educated Indian data scientist have given up their high-paying jobs in the west to try out their luck in India.

Why Indian Data Scientist Are Fit For The International Market

With premium institutes in the country providing industry readiness for its graduates, even fresh graduates come with sound academical knowledge. Even though the Indian educational system lags behind in providing practical knowledge, young data scientist professionals have quickly adapted to the industry standards with great agility.

India is a base for experienced DS professionals: Another key advantage that they pose is the minimum industry experience that they come with. According to a study released by Analytics India Magazine last year, the average work experience of analytics professionals in India was 7.9 years which is up from 7.7 years from 2017. The country also has more than 28,000 Analytics professionals with more than 10 years experience.

Given the availability of immense talent pool and with India moving several notch-up in large scale technological adoption, in coming years we will see more Indian talents leading data teams internationally and at home. With the future looking very promising for emerging technologies, more young Indian data scientist will emerge as top-tech leaders.

India is the third largest developer market:  “India is soon going to be the third biggest developer market in India as a lot of investment is happening learning, so data science as a stream is picking up and there is a lot of innovations happening. To sum up, there is a lot of positive outlook towards the industry,” said Sandeep Alur, Partner Technology Engagement, Microsoft India, at MLDS 2019.

Availability of ML talent in India: “Data science is no longer about sitting there and coding in Python. It is much more than knowing traditional coding sets rather it is about knowing about the optimisation of large data,” explained Madalasa Venkataraman, Chief Data Scientist at TEG Analytics.

Vibrant ecosystem: “Given the demand and scale that we have as a company, we are entering new gaps and building up a strong partnership in India and we came to India to invest in this ecosystem and we are tremendously benefiting from it. We are very bullish on enabling AbInBeV’s dream through our collaboration with India and most importantly, our dream is to export data science professionals from India to democratise the talent,” Ravinder K Sharma of ABInBev told AIM.

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