Japanese firms look to IIT for talent

Representatives of several Japanese companies are calling on Indian Institute of Technology campuses to look for technology talent, amidst signs of increasing rapport between India and Japan.

Some of the Japanese majors that visited IIT Bombay (IIT-B) in the first phase of placements included Sony Japan, Daikin Manufacturing, Konica Minolta, NEC Japan and Uhuru Software. The salary packages being offered by the firms range from Rs15 lakh to Rs35 lakh, the report said.

According to SK Mehta, assistant training officer, IIT-B, the institute had received very good feedback about its students from Japanese companies. He added, Japanese culture was very conservative and they felt Indian students were more adaptable for their foreign operations.

This year, 15 Japanese firms are expected to come calling at IIT-B, significantly more than the five that recruited students last year.

Mehta said Japanese national broadcaster NHK had filmed the placement process at IIT-B this year and interviewed top recruiters and students. He said, with increasing awareness, IIT-B expected more Japanese firms to visit next year.

IIT Kanpur too had seen the number of Japanese firms visiting the campus double. Sony Japan and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries were two of the companies that had hired talent in the first phase of placements.

Amit Saraswat, placement coordinator at IIT Kanpur, said during the first year, students recruited by the firms would be posted in Japan and then sent on international postings.

The placement office at IIT Kanpur had also started a course on Japanese language and culture and the institute also has plans to release a placement brochure in Japanese, apart from the one in English.

Meanwhile, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, has beaten its peers in terms of the highest pay package offered to students, with Google Inc offering an annual salary of Rs 1.54 crore each to four IIT-Roorkee students. The institute, which would place 1,600 students this year, has seen 60 companies visit the campus so far with one-fourth of the batch size already placed.

Reports quoted a placement official as saying that placement so far had been good and the institute was confident of placing 1,200 students before it closed the first phase of placements.

Pay packages in the region of Rs1.3 crore had also been seen at other IITs, which came from a number of US software firms.

The IITs said that this year, Asian countries, too, have recruited in good numbers. "The mix of origin countries of multinational companies (MNC) is increasingly getting diverse. Earlier, an MNC would mostly mean an American firm. But now, more and more Japanese, Korean, French, German and other European firms are coming to the campus," said a placement committee member at IIT-Kanpur.