I'll try to reply cautiously, but I don't think your picture of innovation is accurate. To start with, the big-5 IT majors find it very difficult to attract talent. Even back when I was in college ('98-), the IT majors were a fallback option for most people. In fact, the best students didn't even bother applying there. This has only gotten worse now, from what I hear.
It is also my opinion that there isn't a lot of innovation happening in these places. You could see some of the work being published (in their blogs) but the quality of work (or innovation) is nothing to write home about. Many of them are simply rehashed whitepapers on topics widely discussed on the internet.
Having said that, I don't think Indian IT is in any sort of danger, in fact things are getting better. Interesting work is happening, just not in large IT companies. There are way more talented, passionate, excited tech folks here than at any time before.
>>In fact, the best students didn't even bother applying there. This has only gotten worse now, from what I hear.
Largely because these companies pay less, not because quality of work in product companies is higher.
I worked at a onsite location for a company which is one of the largest internet companies. We were all hired to work there after elaborate interviews. And we used to be repeatedly told they hire only the best, from the best universities and all that. Yet when we worked together as a team, most of these kids hired from IIT's who really believed they were some special snow flakes and all they really got to work on was HTML and some small time shell scripts. These kids had never seen what it meant work on a P1 bug after clocking full nighter, never had any exposure command line kung fu, they didn't know what it meant to having spend a full weekend writing a 2K line perl script because someone at the top wanted a prototype/reporting application done by Monday, heck for all the algorithm geniuses they were considered they could barely do any genuine work of significance to the real world. All they were really interested is in learning the next set of interview questions that were in trend so they could get some one in their alumni have an interview arranged for their next jobs.
The irony is we did bulk of the really algorithmic work there was. We set up a good deal of hadoop infrastructure and platform, we wrote a great deal of what were the complex workflows. And got a lot of systems and applications set up. Yet we were thought of as some kind of lesser children.
I'd really judge the best students/best professionals by the work they do, not the college they belong to, or their degree or their college network.
Show me what work you've done. Everything else is just hot air.
I'm preparing for my campus placements and I feel so frustrated by having to solve algorithmic puzzles because that's all that companies ask in interviews, everything else is secondary. I have so much interest in OS and networks but so few companies are there that offer challenging or exciting jobs in these fields in India. Most of the work is testing and validation and all the design and architecture work is done in the US division of the companies.
This leaves students with no other option but to study what is required for the interviews and get trapped in the eternal interview-study-promotion-interview loop. The lucky ones go to US.
It is also my opinion that there isn't a lot of innovation happening in these places. You could see some of the work being published (in their blogs) but the quality of work (or innovation) is nothing to write home about. Many of them are simply rehashed whitepapers on topics widely discussed on the internet.
Having said that, I don't think Indian IT is in any sort of danger, in fact things are getting better. Interesting work is happening, just not in large IT companies. There are way more talented, passionate, excited tech folks here than at any time before.