If a recent report prepared jointly by the Washington-based India-US World Affairs Institute, the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) is to be believed, between 2004 and 2009, 90 Indian enterprises made 127 green-field investments worth $5.5 billion to create directly 16,576 jobs in the US. Minnesota, Virginia, Texas, Ohio and California are among the main beneficiaries. The companies include Essar Steel, JSW Steel, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Welspun Group, Reliance Adlabs, Indage Gr., HCL, Flag Telecom, Reliance Industries (RIL), Tata Communications and PSL.

The report says that during the five-year period, Indian companies made 372 acquisitions in the US. Of them, 267 acquisitions cost $21 billion. The employment data available with the researchers pertained to only 85 companies, combining over 40,000 jobs. The job data for other companies is still being processed. The acquisitions cover a wide range of industries - manufacturing, biotech, energy, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, steel, automotive, telecommunications, IT and ITes. India sent the largest pool of 'foreign students', numbering over 105,000 in 2009 and making a net contribution to the US economy of over $2.40 billion. The report, detailing an analysis of America's economic engagement with India for the period, 2004-09, and its impact on the US economy, was released last month by Congressman Jim McDermott, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans.

With Indian presence in US economy and life getting increasingly visible, there is a growing interest among academics and researchers in studying the new trend almost on the similar lines as one witnessed in the 1980s concerning the engagement of the People's Republic of China. Another joint study by the University of California (Berkeley) and Duke University in 2007 came to a conclusion that immigrant Indian entrepreneurs have founded more engineering and technology companies between 1995 and 2005 than those from Britain, China, Japan and Taiwan combined during this period. A US National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) study, also in 2007, found that Indians figured the most among foreign-born founders of venture capital-backed public companies, followed by those from Great Britain, China, Iran and France. Some of the more such well-known companies, founded or co-founded by PIOs, are: Sun Microsystems (29,000 employees), Syntel (13,600 employees), Bose' Corporation (8,000 employees), iGate (6,910 employees), Kanbay International (6,900 employees) and Akmai (1,750 employees).

According to the last US Census Bureau report, there were 231,000 businesses owned by Indian Americans in 2002, with a gross turnover of $89 billion. They employed over a total of 615,000 workers. Currently, there are about 10,000 Indian American owners of hotels and motels in the country, representing over 40 per cent of all hotels in the US and 39 per cent of the total room capacity. In all, they own over 21,000 hotels providing a total of 1.8 million guest rooms. They employ 578,000 workers and control assets worth $129 billion.

Most Indians living in or doing business with the US belong to the wealthy and upper middle-class. The travel and tourism trade between the two countries is booming with high spending Indian visitors far outstripping the number of their counterpart from the US. The number of Indian restaurants and grocery shops is growing all over this vast country - from Hawaii in the Pacific and Alaska in the Arctic to states in the mainland — separated by various time zones. They are visited not only by resident Indians and PIOs, but also Americans and others as the latter are increasingly developing a taste for the wide range of Indian cuisine representing various regional culinary cultures. Immigrant Indians - the academics, engineers, metallurgists, software personnel, professional bankers, Wall Street fund managers, journalists, politicians, legal practitioners, administrators, scientists and physicians (over 50,000 medical specialists) - are enriching the American life everyday, everywhere.

For a change, India is regularly featuring in the US print and electronic media, mostly for good reasons. Recently, the New York Times devoted almost a full page on how Chennai is emerging as India's Detroit of yesterday. Both the NYT and Wall Street Journal regularly carry news stories and features about developments in India - from 'honour killing', caste conflict, Maoist menace and railway accident casualty to child development, education, heavy rain in North India, economy and diplomacy. More people talk about India's progress and concerns in cocktail circuits in Washington D.C. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas or even in more quiet Cleveland, where London-based ferrous metal tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has acquired the biggest steel plant of the region, than they ever did before anywhere. It seems the people-to-people engagement between the two large democracies, which began over half a century ago, is finally gathering momentum as both sides are inclined to trust and respect each other as responsible global citizen. (IPA Service)