The company has decided to recruit about 200 Indian engineers by 2003 from the country's various institutions including the IITs, the regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) and others for the Gurgaon centre. These engineering graduates will join the company as Marconi employees and will undergo an orientation programme and finally a three-year masters programme on telecom. The company hopes the investment in training will work as a good retention strategy for Marconi. "We are trying to design a package which is attractive from the point of view of career, training and education, as also salaries and working conditions." Elaborating on the company's India plan, Mr Peter MacKenzie Smith said: "Apart from our business interests, we are also looking to India for attracting people for our company to work here and elsewhere."

According to Mr Smith, his company had already been tapping into the India talent pool recruiting 90 engineers last year. Marconi Plc. is a global telecommunications and IT company with around 55,000 employees worldwide and sales in over 100 countries. It supplies advanced communications solutions and the key technologies and services for the Internet. Marconi's main divisions are communications (optical fibre networks, routing and broadband switching, access solutions, wireless access etc), services (network design, planning, building and deployment, operations and management), mobile (secure communications, private mobile radio systems, public mobile networks) and systems (medical imaging, retail automation, digital imaging, online data and so on).