From financial services to pharmaceuticals and from information technology to manufacturing, there are many business sectors which offshore work and which have largely benefitted from it.

The manufacturing sector was the first to offshore production to more cost-effective locations which offered trained manpower at much lesser wages compared to onshore. This was really the start of offshoring as cost-arbitrage made a lot of business sense. The Information Technology or the Software Development industry, in the early 90's,

played a major role by offshoring and outsourcing a lot of their work to countries like India which had trained manpower, including engineers, and governments which pursued programs of economic reform committed to liberalization and privatization, attracting companies here.

Advancements in telecommunication and fiber optics, which made Internet-based communication and transfer of data possible, paved

the way further for outsourcing to India.

The last decade or so, has seen financial institutions and banks, offshore their operations to India. With benefits like easy availability of skilled accountants, access to the latest finance and accounting software, assured security, and low cost of labor, made India an ideal destination for backend business process operations support. The availability of technology talent, the demographics of the country with a large young population, add to that the proficiency in the English language added to the already existing advantages making India an attractive long term investment. Apart from traditional sectors like Manufacturing,

IT and Finance, there are other sectors such as Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), Medical Transcription, Intellectual Property,

Customized Software Development and Healthcare which are seeing renewed attention and focus.