Instead of being welcomed with open arms, the once highly prized professionals are being questioned and subjected to minute checks of their travel and work documents.

"I feel this is the start of a backlash. The bottom line is we are taking away jobs from others," said Vinay Deshpande, chairman of Encore Software Limited, which makes cheap handheld computers or "Simputers."

"These are warning signs, though I do not think it has reached an endemic stage," Deshpande told AFP.

A week ago, authorities in the Netherlands arrested around 12 employees of Bombay-based information technology firm, I-flex, and asked them to leave the country within a week for alleged visa irregularities.

In London, the chief executive officer of the company's Dutch subsidiary, Senthil Kumar, was arrested at the behest of the Dutch authorities.

"The backlash that we are witnessing has its roots in the social problems being faced by many countries, including unemployment," said S. Ramadorai, chief executive officer of Tata Consultancy Services.

"Increasingly we are witnessing an economic slowdown with job losses taking place around the world and certain social issues with an emotive content have emerged," he said.

The arrest of the I-flex employees was the third such case involving Indian IT professionals in a year.

In March, Malaysian authorities arrested 270 Indian software engineers for alleged visa irregularities, while last year top officials of Polaris Software India Limited were detained in Indonesia.

The incidents sparked outrage in India and the foreign ministry took up the cases with individual governments, even demanding an apology from Malaysia and warning of a diplomatic fallout.

This week the government said it was going to provide an "escort service" to its software professionals to guide them on visa regulations.

"Our ministry will work with the industry on what the visa requirements are in different countries and tell them to obey scrupulously," Minister for Communications and Information Technology Arun Shourie said Tuesday.

Shourie said India's software industry was best in the world but cheap manpower being exported outside for software development and research was hurting the employment of other nations.

"It does impact jobs elsewhere. The free movement of IT professionals depend on overall bargaining strengths of India. We have to be economically strong and competitive," Shourie said.

India has the largest pool of English-speaking manpower after the United States.

Its army of software professionals have capitalised on the software boom in India, whose global software exports are slated to grow 29 percent to 470 billion rupees (9.7 billion dollars) in the financial year which ended March

Many have gone abroad, willing to work for one-eighth the salaries of their counterparts in United States and Europe.

But many global IT firms have sacked thousands of workers to cope with a cut in technology spending.

And now many countries, including the United States and Britain, are planning laws to clamp down on government outsourcing work to other nations.

Vivek Paul, vice chairman and president of Wipro Technologies, the global information technology arm of Wipro Ltd, India's third largest software exporter, said the move was "inevitable."

"We went through a lot of pain when there was manufacturing globalisation. Now there is services globalisation. We have seen this movie before and we know how it ends," Paul told AFP.

But he said the lay-offs in the global technology industry were a blip.

"The reality is that whichever numbers you look at, it continues to indicate a rising shortfall between supply and demand for technology workers in all the developed markets," he said.

Encore chief Deshpande echoed Paul's views and said there was a massive shortage of skilled manpower in the industry.

"Actually, they have invited us. India has a large pool of manpower. It is filling a void and one must not view them as takers away of jobs," he said.

SPACE.WIRE