NEW DELHI: Prime minister designate Manmohan Singh has made it clear he wants all IT roads to lead to India. This not only means a lot can be expected in terms of protecting the outsourcing business, but also in terms of encouraging the reverse brain drain. Well, guess what?

The trend has already begun and it seems like a lot of techies are heading to Mera Bharat for "all the exciting R&D work that's on." Nasscom's initiatives to smoothen the return, US companies' need to track outsourced work better as well as IT majors' schemes to get Indians to work at their India Development Centres show all signs of gathering steam under Mr Singh's regime .

And it's not just Indians returning, Americans who participated in the globalisation boom in the Nineties are thirsting for the same challenge and excitement.

Take for instance, John Winchester who has recently shifted from the US to India as vice-president, engineering of the Indore-based Impetus Technologies.

The company is doing cutting edge work in outsourced core software product R&D for US clients. Prior to this, he was working with NightFire Software, now merged with NeuStar Inc - a near monopoly player in the number portability space in US. NeuStar works with Impetus for certain core elements of their telecom infrastructure products.

Mr Winchester told The Economic Times , "Even as my company got taken over I was ready for a change. I approached Impetus who was my client earlier as I was impressed by all the energy in the company on my visits to India.

And when the India opportunity presented itself, I saw it as a great career challenge too. The company is witnessing an extremely rapid growth and my responsibility would obviously go beyond the normal VP-Engineering type of activities. It would involve scaling the company's growth too."

He says several of his techie friends in the US would be equally interested in coming here. "May be not very senior level ones, but mid-career IT professionals are looking out," he adds.

Adobe India's chief Naresh Gupta agrees. "We do get a lot of resumes from other nationals seeking to be part of the excitement. So far we have hired Indians in large numbers - most of them are senior professionals who have put in between 10-20 years who sense "an opportunity to grow" back home.

The work carried out by India Development Centres triggered this. High-end chip development, product development, and business applications work at Oracle, Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments to name the obvious.

The story of Intel's 'Return to Home' programme since September last year is now known. Intel India which has already seen 150 families reconnecting under the scheme. "We now have 1,800 employees and plan to take this number to 3,000 by next year," said Company sources.

Nasscom's Kiran Karnik is tracking the trend closely. "They are coming home in large numbers. Some 15,000-20,000 in the last two years alone, because gradually it is India and China which is the 'happening place' for the techies." So much so, the IT association has already started getting feedback and demands for better facilitation.

It is soon starting a link to a virtual employment exchange to connect Indian employers and mid-level professionals. "When they attain some seniority, they hesitate to apply to an ad and they really cannot tap job fairs like the fresh ones do," explains Mr Karnik.

Based on personal accounts of those who have returned, Nasscom has prepared a wish-list for government support. No customs duties on gold and other valuables which can be proved to have been in use for three years, admissions for children in schools, sometimes mid-term and also perhaps an incentive of sorts?