us vs U.S.

This week the Engg vice President of the company(the headquarters are in US) for which I work is on a visit to India center in Bangalore.
He had a interesting discussion with our team .It is a relatively small company with about 400 employees.
He discussed his personal experiences in B'lore ,specially the traffic and the autorickshaws. Walking on bangalore roads according to him is a harrowing experience ,you never now when u are going to get hit. According to him at the intersections it is the bicycle riders who determine who will cross first.:-)
His observations certainly have merit .In India we do what is called 'instinticutal driving' ie we follow our instincts while driving and not the traffic rules.
Coming to the second part of discussion ,the topic was what is the difference between working in India and working in US .
One issue which is most often discussed in the software sector is the quality of work we do in India. The fact is that most of the design work which is the most creative part (and therefore most satisfying) happens in US or Europe. We in India most of the times do some development ,maintenance and testing work.Pure design and development in the high technology sector at least, happens rarely .And this is true for all the technology companies.

Now the question is why this is the case ?
The first thing is the market. The market for which the design happens is in Europe/US.SO naturally requirements come from there.So the design happens there. Second and perhaps the most important factor is the skill .In skill we lack behind the Engineers in US/Europe.For example the software(and hardware) development in US has been going on in US since the early 1950's whreas we started only in late seventies.
We still lack the manpower required for high-tech technology development.
There is a third very interesting reason.
The software sector in India is witnessing a massive growth.The salaries are increasing at 20% per year due to large demand supply gap. This is resulting in frequent job hopping by the employees. Now in high technology sector domain knowledge is very important.But if engineers change their domain every 3-4 years it becomes difficult to get experienced domain experts which is basic to any high technology design and development work.
The VP compared the growth in India's IT sector to that of Singapore.In 1970's Singapore was just a emerging economy like ours.At that time it witnessed tremendous growth in manufacturing sector and in annual salary hikes were in the range of 20%
(same as Indian IT sector) The then Singapore govt.(it was ruled by dictator then) used the opportunity for the overall development of economy .Now Singapore is considered a developed economy.Incidentally all the manufacturing has moved from Singapore to neighbouring geographies.May be India can learn a lesson or two from Singapore.