The Boston Globe revealed why tens of thousands of information technology jobs have been outsourced overseas in the past couple of years, and why major U.S. banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies plan to ship 500,000 more jobs abroad in the next five years.

A graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology with a master's in business administration can be hired for $12,000. Compare that to the average starting salary or $102,338 for a Harvard Business School graduate.

The figure of a half-million jobs was reported by business consulting firm A.T. Kearney Inc., which surveyed 100 major companies. It is all a matter of money; the big banks are following the trail to Asia blazed by Microsoft Corp. and IBM.

A study by Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass., estimates that the rush to export U.S. jobs will accelerate, and that U.S. corporations will send 3.3 million jobs overseas by 2015. India is expected to get 70 percent because many Indians speak English.

The future is now. U.S. companies already employ Indians to do research and development, prepare tax returns, evaluate health insurance claims, transcribe doctors' medical notes, analyze financial data, dun for overdue bills, read CAT scans, create presentations for investment banks, and more.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is planning to set up an equity research department in Bombay, India, and build up its Technopolis, India, office to 1,100 employees by the end of this year. Delta Air Lines has contracted with two Indian companies to handle some reservations.

Morgan Stanley plans to experiment with hiring stock analysts in India, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup are studying the benefits of shipping research jobs to India. Industry observers say that every bank on Wall Street will soon reap the cost benefits of the inexhaustible supply of business graduates in India eager to work for as little as 10 percent of the market rate in New York or London.

General Electric Co. shifted software development and back-office jobs to India under Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch. Today, GE's Indian engineers are contracted for tasks as sophisticated as analyzing the materials for and the design of engines for new jet airplanes.

Not only U.S. steelworkers and blue-collar manufacturing workers are getting shafted by the global economy. So are smart college graduates. As one executive, who has no shame about replacing U.S. citizens with foreigners, said, "If it can be done by sitting at a desk in front of a computer, then it can be done abroad."

Some U.S. companies, such as American Express Co., are using Indians to service U.S. customers by telephone. The Indians adopt Western names (Sanjeep becomes Sam, Radhika turns into Ruth), learn how to avoid British colloquialisms and take speech therapy so that they sound like American.

Many U.S. companies subcontract with Indian software-serving companies, especially with the three largest: The Tata Group of Companies, Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Technologies. These companies transfer their employees to the United States on L-1 visas, which are supposed to be issued only to key employees. Continued...