John Ribeiro

Oracle Corp. is recruiting about 250 employees per month in India, said Charles Phillips, the company's president, on a two-day visit to the country.

India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) is pressing World Trade Organization (WTO) members in Geneva to assemble an agreement on a framework for agriculture trade, in order to move on to the liberalization of trade in services.

The Indian government's budget, introduced Thursday in Parliament, belies fears that leftist parties supporting the new government led by the Congress Party would scuttle the country's reform program.

The number of mobile phones in India is expected to outstrip fixed-line phones by the end of this year, according to India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Delhi. But government-owned operators still dominate the country's telephone services market.

General Electric Co. (GE) is stepping up its outsourcing of software development to India. It has contracted MindTree Consulting Pvt. Ltd. in Bangalore to set up a GE Global Development Center. The software development centre will be managed by MindTree, the companies said Wednesday.

D-Link India Ltd. has developed low-cost, Linux-based networking equipment such as routers and firewalls, and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones, specially designed for the requirements of emerging economies, according to an executive of the company.

Before entering the facilities of Wipro Spectramind, the business process outsourcing (BPO) unit of Wipro Ltd. in Bangalore, India, employees are frisked, mobile phone use is prohibited and technology is used to monitor and record data records accessed through employee computers.

Having handled a large chunk of its own global accounting functions from a subsidiary in Bangalore for more than three years, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is now offering similar back-office services from India to its customers, sources familiar with the plans said.