Moreover, these institutes have embarked on a strategy to make a dent in the international computer education market. This automatically speaks volumes about the quality of the courseware and education supplied by them. NIIT incidentally, is mulling over the prospect of acquiring a foreign company--an indication of the years of experience and maturity gained by it in the computer education and software services sector. New players like Wintech are treading on the same path albeit by catering to new niche areaslike the Internet. Web-based education is slated to take off in a big way in India.

There are several lessons to be learnt from these success stories. If our software institutes can do well abroad, why not other institutes for other kinds of education. We have no dearth of good teachers. These advantages could apply to other service areas such as nursing. These are sectors where the inputs needed to train quality professionals are minimal. Given sufficient fillip, the personnel from this service sector could easily carve a niche for themselves worldwide. Similarly budding talent in the hotel industry needs to be nurtured to pave the way for global careers. With dissemination of information the catchword, a lot of promising talent might emerge in the print and visual media. In the ultimate analysis, our human capital may well prove to be our biggest source of competitive advantage.