Outsourcing and development giant Infosys has called for more education on the issue of sending IT work to India following the media roasting it received over a development partnership with Telstra.

Ananda Rao, Australia country manager for Infosys, told ZDNet Australia  that he's not upset about the treatment the company has received, but says people should learn more about the topic.

"I think rather than disappointed I say we should educate these type of media people more--they don't know the facts and figures," he said.

The fundamental problem, according to Rao, is the assumption that companies only outsource to India on the basis of cost.

"It's not about cost--it's about skills," he said.

Describing the Indian education system as -phenomenal" in the context of IT, Rao outlined the hiring policy for the Indian company, and put forward some astonishing statistics.

-A rookie goes through 18 weeks of intense training before they're allowed to touch a computer and everyone has to be a graduate coming from the top 5-10 percent of their [engineering] class," he said. "Last year, we received 400,000 qualified applications...we chose 4,000".

Australian IT workers often become jaded over working with old legacy systems, Rao said. Indian companies can take some of the -leg work" away from young IT workers who prefer to work at the cutting edge.

"Let us look at the complete spectrum...look at the young kids that come out of schools. They're not interested in working with legacy systems here in Australia...they become dispassionate".

Sending this type of work overseas represents an opportunity for Australian companies by providing them with access to more resources so they may implement ideas that would have otherwise been left undeveloped, he said.

Rao dismisses as untrue claims that wages for their workers were as low as AU$12,000 a year.

"That is definitely a good wage in India [but] we pay more...otherwise we cannot attract the best talent," he said.

Managing director of Melbourne based data centre and development house Imagineering Technologies, Matthew Proctor, said he'd considered sending work to India before.

-We have looked at it...the costs are very attractive but the commercial risk is too high for us," he said.

Although he has never engaged the services of offshore code factories before, Proctor can understand why larger companies do. He agrees with Infosys' Rao--outsourcing to India is about resources, not just cost.

-This is a global industry that we work in. If we had the resources here in Australia we'd do it here," Proctor said, adding that India has excellent infrastructure and an enormous number of skilled workers, so it made sense to take advantage of that.

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