For example, Wipro Ltd. in Bangalore, India, said in its latest quarterly earnings report last week that its workforce had reached 51,000 employees as of Dec. 31 -- up 30 percent from the start of 2005.

It's a similar, or even better, story at Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd., which said earlier this month that it had 49,400 workers as of Dec. 31. That amounts to a 40 percent year-over-year increase.

Those gains come as offshore firms and the Indian operations of U.S. vendors are seeking to expand into relatively new areas, such as IT infrastructure outsourcing.

Last month, Dallas-based Perot Systems Corp. started offering infrastructure management services from its facilities in India, where 6,000 of the company's 17,000 employees are based.

Mike McClaskey, Perot's CIO, said last week that the infrastructure work is a small part of the firm's business and that the Indian unit will provide the management services remotely. There's no cost advantage for a U.S.-based vendor to move servers to India, he said. Moreover, India still lacks the third-party disaster recovery facilities that are available in the U.S., McClaskey said.