A picturesque city that lies along the Taihu Lake resort of the Jiangsu province, is planning to build a "little India" in years to come in order to become a major service outsourcing center. Wuxi is traditionally a manufacturing city, but with focus on environmental protection, and especially after a serious blue-green algae outbreak in Taihu Lake, city leaders started to study how to transform the city's development.

Wuxi decided to replace manufacturing with the service outsourcing industry, which has far less pollution and consumes much less energy, a China Daily reports.

The city is expected to attract 30 to 40 billion dollars in service outsourcing business and help create jobs for one million people by 2020, equivalent to that of India as a whole in 2007. The advancement of the service outsourcing industry cannot survive without a large talent pool. But the city three years ago learned that fewer than 2,000 students in the city were studying software and information technology fields.

As a result, Wuxi established a goal to build a total area of six million sq m for software service outsourcing within three years, and encouraged enterprises to cultivate and import skilled workers.

The local government joined India's National Institute of Information Technologies (NIIT), the world's second-largest educational institution, to establish the NIIT (China) Outsourcing College in Wuxi as a training base for the city's outsourcing businesses.

While the domestic macro-economy continues to be affected by the global financial crisis, outsourcing is maintaining robust growth in Wuxi.  The city signed 1.14 billion dollars in contracts from January to July, up 110 percent year-on-year.

After India became world's largest service-outsourcing base, many East Asian countries including Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam have begun competing for more market share.

Source: ANI