In the 1960s, the Indian government set up a series of elite engineering institutes called the Indian Institute of Technology at New Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras. Each of these was set up with technical collaboration from countries like the US (Kanpur), West Germany (Delhi) and the former Soviet Union (Bombay).
Competition to get in is stiff: each year about 200,000 high school students sit a set of gruelling entrance tests, and of these barely 10,000 are selected. Coursework and instruction are world-class and are fully subsidised, so that even the most needy student can concentrate only on academic work and does not need to find part-time jobs.
Graduating students invariably get admission with full financial aid to most of the top universities in western countries. From there it's a quick ride to key management positions or research labs in countries around the world. In fact, Business Week magazine, in a cover story last year, observed that the institutes were the world's most cost-effective producers of business and technology success stories.
The colleges and universities graduate about 10,000 computer science students each year, but many students from other disciplines or employees in mid-career tracks switch over to computer science via enrolment at professional training institutes (like ApTech, NIIT, WinTech, MicroUniv).