Market analysts says India now feeling the squeeze on IT skills at home.

There is a certain irony when you hear a market analyst such as Gartner this week say that India, the home of many of the world’s off-shored IT and telecommunication services, must itself now start seeking to do the same. And what’s more, for many of the same reasons that saw India originally pick up that work.

Gartner believes that many Indian organisations are seeing the challenges of a shortage of skilled IT workers. According to Linda Cohen, vice president and distinguished analyst for Gartner’s IT sourcing group, the booming Indian economy is exacerbating a problem where demand is outstripping the supply of local skilled workers.

According to Gartner, India’s economy grew an impressive 9.2% for the 2006-07 financial year (ending March 2007) and is second only to China in the world economic growth stakes.

IT budgets for Indian companies grew at beyond 16% last year, well above the worldwide average of just 3.16%. As a result, Gartner believes that India will be forced to offshore a growing amount of IT work to take advantage of its booming economic conditions.

The most likely candidates according to Arup Roy, senior research analyst for Gartner’s IT services market group, will be Singapore and Hong Kong.

“The market has already seen the first signs of this trend. For example, the Indian embassy outsourced its visa collection and delivery services to a U.S. company. Many Indian IT firms with operations spread across the U.S. and Europe are now outsourcing a part of their administrative work locally” Roy said.

The irony is that as India booms, it may be forced back to western countries to find suitable workers, workers who were most likely put out of work when companies chose India to offshore its IT & T services in the first place.

These are certainly strange times and it may well be that the next time you receive that unwanted late-evening sales phone call, it might be coming from closer to home than you originally thought.