Techies’ salaries in India, China rising fast: survey

India's software industry may be fast losing its low-cost destination advantage, according to the 2009 EE Times Global Salary & Opinion Survey.

Engineers' salaries in India and China have risen at a pace faster than that in some of their European counterparts like Japan and North America, the survey says.

Almost 40 per cent of the respondents in India have seen their salaries grow much or slightly higher than what they were 5 years ago, while only 34 per cent of respondents in Europe and 25 per cent of that in North America reported a hike during the same time, it says.

The study says that competition for engineering talent in India and its emerging rival China has got tougher in the last 10 years as hardware and software companies have accelerated the transfer of manufacturing and design operations from Western locations to lower-cost parts of the globe.

This growing competition often makes companies offer attractive incentives to hire experienced engineers, only to lose them to rivals after a couple of years.

However, though IT employees in both China and India have seen better raises over the last few years than their counterparts in the developed world, majority of the techies in the two countries still earn considerably less than their counterparts elsewhere, the study adds.