By JEREMY KAHN


BANGALORE, India - After years of being blamed for job losses in America and elsewhere, India’s high-tech companies and outsourcing firms are going through a downturn of their own. The global slowdown is forcing them to reduce hiring, freeze salaries, postpone new investments and lay off thousands of software programmers and call center operators.

While some industry insiders insist the global crisis will actually benefit companies here, as Western businesses seek to cut costs by moving jobs overseas, right now the sector is suddenly gripped by an unfamiliar sense of uncertainty.

“It’s certainly not irrational exuberance,”said Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys, one of India’s best-known technology outsourcing firms.“There is a lot of introspection about what does this mean and when does it end.”

The downturn is exposing a deeper concern: India has become the world’s front office, handling customer service calls, and its back office, helping to process payments and run accounting and other computer systems. But it has not yet become the head office - making major new products, pioneering marketing techniques or helping to shape corporate strategy.

“Historically, when it comes to innovation, Indian companies are relatively weak compared to the I.B.M.’s and Accentures of the world,” said Partha Iyengar, the head of research in India for the Gartner Group, which analyzes trends in the tech sector.“It has been their chronic Achilles’heel.”

Long before the shock of the terrorist attacks that temporarily brought Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, to a halt, the country had been suffering the effects of the global slump. It has been losing capital as Western investors fled to the security of American Treasuries, undermining Indian banks and company balance sheets.

Infosys recently scaled back its projections for the year, telling investors that it now expects revenue to expand 13 to 15 percent, instead of the 19 to 21 percent it had forecast and far below the 30 percent annual expansion the company had been used to.

Like many of India’s outsourcing companies, Infosys is heavily dependent on the financial sector, deriving a third of its revenue from banks like Citigroup and Bank of America and other financial clients. Its fate is also closely tied to the American economy: two-thirds of its business comes from the United States. Neither factor bodes well for the company’s prospects.

Technology Partners International, a consulting firm that publishes an index of global outsourcing deals, says its index is at a 10-year low.“People think that outsourcing is a recession-proof industry. It is not,” said Siddharth Pai, a partner at the firm.

That realization has changed the boomtown atmosphere of this city. In a country where most marriages are arranged by parents, the downturn has even taken a toll on the matrimonial prospects of those in technology outsourcing.“Because there is no job guarantees for I.
T. people, for the last six months brides’families have not been accepting grooms from this background,”said Jagadeesh Angadi, a matchmaker in Bangalore.

But India’s business leaders see opportunity in the downturn.“Once things settle down, people will start looking at their business operations and how to make them more efficient, and that is where we play,”Mr.Nilekani said.

That may come too late for workers like Vikram Hathwar.

In July, Mr.Hathwar, a 22-year-old engineer, graduated from a technical college with a job offer from a software developer. But instead of starting his job - paying nearly $6,000 a year, a good starting salary in this country - Mr.Hathwar has been waiting for a letter from the company telling him when to report for work.

“I called them and they said they would be calling two or three months later, but still they have not informed me anything about when I should start,”Mr.Hathwar said.

In the meantime, he has begun looking for a temporary job.“The recession has made for all these pressures on us,”Mr.Hathwar said.“It is very confusing to know what to do.”