According to Lucent Technologies India president Vijay Gupta, many more such development facilites are in the offing in the coming years. He said Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent, will employ upto 300 highly trained professionals at the Hyderabad facility. This will help to double the company's team of research professionals in the country to 600, Gupta said.While refusing to divulge the quantum of investment to be made in India this year, Gupta said that the company would induct fresh funds into their facilities as and when required. "The investments we make are mostly in terms of human resources," he added.

The Hyderabad facility will focus on third generation (3G) mobile network platform. 3G wireless networks will offer high-speed mobile Internet capabilities and two-way multimedia communication from mobile devices, senior company executives said.

Addressing mediapersons, Bell Laboratories president Arun Netravali said that India has a huge advantage over other countries because of its human capital. "There is a need to bring this capital together and organise them in laboratories to create networks of tomorrow," he added.

Netravalli told eFE Bell Labs has tied up with the Indian Institute of Technology to leverage their expertise and are offering scholarships to students and conduct joint projects with faculty. Bell would be strengthening its linkages with other higher educational institutions in the country. "We hope to come out with more concrete action in this regard in the course of the year," he said. Bell Labs would look at incubating research projects in India, he said.

In 1999, Lucent invested nearly 12 per cent of its revenue ($4.5 billion) in research and development efforts around the globe. Lucent Technologies is committed to directing one per cent of its revenue to long term research in basic science, Netravali said. However, the large part of development work carried out in Bell Labs is product-related. Netravali was of the opinion that it should not be difficult to organise India's large pool of technical manpower for doing research in the country.