In the past five years, more than 100 information technology and scientific firms have opened R&D labs in India. Leading companies are drawn to India because it is home to some of the world’s brightest minds and sharpest innovators.

India churns out 300,000 IT engineering graduates a year — six times as many as America produces.

In 1999, India’s IT industry contributed 1.3 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Last year, it more than doubled to 3 percent, with $16 billion in sales, 75 percent of it to overseas customers. By 2008, India’s annual sales from IT are expected to exceed $50 billion.

Sales of IT services by Infosys, India’s first publicly listed billion-dollar IT company, have increased 800 percent in five years. Its corporate training facility is the largest in the world, with 4,000 students enrolled at a time.

But the outlook for India’s economy is not all positive. Several recent articles in New Scientist and The Economist reveal a number of contradictory facts about India. It has a population of more than 1 billion people and the world’s 11th largest economy. However, its population includes more than 25 percent of the world’s poorest people, and hundreds of millions of Indians lack a steady supply of electricity. And while India has nearly 300 universities that trained more than 3.2 million science students last year alone, nearly 40 percent of adults are illiterate.

The country’s economy has grown at an average rate of 6 percent per year since 1991, when India opened itself to the global economy. During that time, its average GDP per person, adjusted for purchasing power, has doubled. Since 1978, it has reduced the percentage of its citizens who are living below the poverty threshold from 50 percent to 25 percent.

Yet, there is still a broad gap between India’s haves and have-nots — between those who are highly educated and those who are illiterate. Only 6.4 percent of Indians earned more than $7,500 in 2002, while 73.5 percent made less than $2,000.

To connect its vast population, India is also building a wireless infrastructure. Last year, the number of cell phones surpassed the number of land-lines. In less than four years, ownership of mobile phones has grown from zero to 45 million. Another 1.5 million to 2 million Indians...