Are Indian IT companies creating talent or ruining it

These days, every now and then we read in news papers, that TCS to recruit 20000 engineers, Infosys added 15000 engineers, India needs 2 lakh more engineers by 2010…etc. No doubt, all these companies are hiring like crazy and possibly, they will continue to hire and reach the 2 lakh mark by 2010.But, it looks like companies do not mind paying these fresh graduates anywhere from 2-6 lakh per annum, just to add to their head count numbers. But it is widely observed across the industry, that the new engineers hired are not used properly and are kept idle for months without assigning any projects to them. These young minds would have entered the industry with lot of dreams to achieve, but these minds are treated like, “I am paying you, just keep quite until I need you”. Even when the jobs are assigned to these youngsters, their talent and knowledge is hardly used and instead they are put onto some job, which would not really need an engineer to perform.We talk so much about the growing IT industry and the growing Indian economy, but the growth is only in terms of the revenue of the companies and to some extent in terms of the salary paid, but the growth in terms of knowledge, intellectual property, is probably nil.Decades after the invention of automobile, we Indian’s are thought of developing our own cars. So, may be few decades from now when the whole world is looking at some new technology, may it be nano technology or bio technology, we will start looking at developing our own cell phones and computers. Do we have any leaders in the industry who would create our own apples, nokias, microsofts, intels. We are so used to servicing other companies, that 1 billion dollar over a period of 25 years has become a great deal, but we dot even bother to look at the companies who have reached over 50billion turnover in just 25-30 years.Isn’t it the high time to realize the importance of developing our own products and competing with the international market or is it still the time to serve the external market and letting our young minds to run some test cases, do some documentation and sit on the bench. We will continue to be the back office of the world forever, and will never come to the forefront of technology.Why don’t we realize that most of the people who designed the Pentium, the windows, the Apollo and the iphone are Indians. Is there a lack of talent in India or Indians, no, but what we lack is the leadership and the vision to take us into the rest of the century, we haven’t been able to come out of the slavery mindset even after decades of our independence.