India Inc. -- Call Centers, Surgeons, Tutors Serve Americans

March 2, 2006 — -- If you call an 800 number for help the next time your computer crashes or your oven breaks, chances are someone in India will answer.

While you sleep, bits of your life -- your insurance forms, credit scores and X-rays -- are being processed in Delhi and Bangalore.

Many U.S. companies are outsourcing customer service, tech and other jobs to India, where they've discovered an educated, cheap -- and with 1.1 billion people, huge -- work force.

Keeping India's economy healthy and growing is crucial to the United States, which wants a strong ally in that part of the world. But many American workers are concerned about their jobs being moved overseas.

As President Bush makes his first visit to India during his presidency, ABC News examines the importance of the world's largest democracy, and how it affects everyday life in the United States.

For a starting salary of $3,200 a year, a million upwardly mobile Indians spend their nights answering questions from confused appliance owners across the globe.

Customer service is a $23 billion-a-year industry in India. It empowers half a million women and forces the traditional society to accept the alarming notion of young ladies being out of the house all night.

Most who work in these call centers are highly educated. In his best-selling novel, "One Night at the Call Center," Chetan Bhagat exposes the frustrations of the job. At one call center he researched, workers posted signs that read "35=10."

"They'd say that a 35-year-old American's IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's IQ. So imagine you're talking to a child. Don't lose your cool when you're talking to them. But this is exactly what is being taught," Bhagat said.

What Americans don't hear are the curses back. It's common practice to put the call on hold and unleash a verbal barrage right back.

As time goes by, it is not just companies tapping into India's cheap brainpower. When Texas mom Elizabeth Mitchell saw her son Jason struggling with math, she hired a tutor --