Nearly 3,000 information technology (IT) experts out of18,000 applicants registered with the Bonn-based Federal Central Office for Employment (ZAV) came from India but a 25-year-old Indonesian computer specialist became the first person to be granted the green card.

The US-style cards, the brain child of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is being implemented within six months of the proposal being mooted to overcome shortage of computer experts The scheme envisages the grant of a five-year residency visa to qualified specialists who must prove they will be paid at least 48,000 dollars annually in Germany.

The federal government has fixed a limit of 20,000 green cards even though German industry has estimated a shortage of 75,000 IT specialists.Germany's IT companies, which had all along given enthusiastic support to the green card, are giving cautious assessment on the fallout of the scheme.The companies apparently do not not expect the new initiative to fill their vacancies for highly qualified and urgently needed computer experts immediately.

"Too few truly qualified applicants have contacted us or government agencies," said Ulrich Lissek, a spokesman for telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom. A spokesman for the Federation of Information Technology Businesses said he expected that the quota for issuance of 10,000 green cards in the first phase would not be used up even in four to six weeks.For the time being, IBM has requested only one green card for an IT specialist from the North African state of Tunisia.

The required minimum salary of 48,000 dollars prompted many people to send applications despite their lack of qualifications, an IBM spokesman said.Even before the formal launch of green cards today, three state governments of Bavaria, Hesse and Lower Saxony had come up with their own version of cards to relax immigration rules, Their blue cards do not not specify a time-frame for the validity of the visa unlike the green card.

Opposition politicians led by section of the conservative Christian Democrats had campaigned against the green cards in a key state election in Germany's populous state of North Rhine Westphalia in May. The campaign was perceived as racist and widely attacked as xenophobic.