India diary, day 5: Margaritas to Mumbai

Thursday 8 February - Mumbai

It's six o'clock in the morning and I'm eating a curry and drinking something that tastes very much like a margarita.

If I was in London I would surely be near the end of a legendary evening of boozing. But in India this is me having a bleary-eyed breakfast of a dosa and some sort of salty lemon drink on the early flight to Mumbai.

Special Report: Inside India

In February silicon.com's Steve Ranger visited the Indian tech hotspots of Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad to explore the exploding Indian offshore tech and BPO industry. Keep up with his daily diaries here.

♦ India diary, day 1: Cyberbad on Sunday
♦ India diary, day 2: Emergency calls and rural life
♦ India diary, day 3: Inside the outsourcing campus
♦ India diary, day 4: Hyderabad's tech park
♦ India diary, day 5: Margaritas to Mumbai
♦ India diary, day 6: Prime Minister's question time
♦ India diary, day 7: Mobiles in Mumbai
♦ India diary, day 8: Pune or bust
♦ India diary, day 9: An auto-rickshaw ride and a catwalk show
♦ India diary, day 10: Lost in Pune
♦ India diary, day 11: I heart Bangalore
♦ India diary, day 12: Searching for the next big thing
♦ India diary, day 13: Thirsty in Bangalore

I'm going to the Nasscom Indian Leadership Forum, the annual get together of the great and good of the Indian IT industry. Last year all the talk was about how to head off security worries around personal data being stolen by call centre staff. I'm wondering what the big theme will be this year.

Earlier, sitting in the departure lounge at Hyderabad, I'd watched Shilpa Shetty being interviewed on Indian TV about her meeting with Tony Blair. I wonder if there will be many mentions of her at the conference.

Mumbai is crowded, hot and polluted. On the way from the airport to the hotel the taxi passes miles of grey slums, single story buildings with corrugated roofs. Villagers are tempted into Mumbai in the hope of well-paid jobs but most end up doing menial work and living in monochrome slums like these. It's depressing stuff.

The main roads are much wider than those in Hyderabad and in pretty good condition. The road I'm on has four or five lanes marked on it but there are at least seven lines of traffic battling their way along it.

The sound of horns is constant and you can smell and taste the fumes. It's the constant jockeying for position and cutting in that makes the driving so stressful here. Yet everyone seems remarkably good humoured about the whole thing and I've not heard any raised voices at all.

The Nasscom conference is crackling with energy. That's unsurprising considering the industry is growing at about 30 per cent per year and is constantly in the headlines in India as a tremendous growth engine for the country.

The organisation's president, Kiran Karnik, is certainly optimistic about the future. "The opportunity for growth in terms of what is offshored is 10 times what has been done," he predicts. Smaller companies in particular are looking at offshoring for the first time, he says.

And while most executives are happy to trumpet the growth of the industry, there is also a recognition that more work needs to be done to make sure that its future is secure too.

After my early start I head to the hotel. It's the second day of the conference tomorrow with the Prime Minister of India speaking, so security is going to be tight.

Have you visited India to check out the outsourcing options? Or have you been affected by offshoring here in the UK? We want to hear your stories and comments. Leave your comments below or email editorial@silicon.com.