Rationale behind our business Are we compensated with the same wage for the same work? What is the salary of a professor of Computer Science in India? What is the salary in USA? The following discussion is based on the values from the Internet on June 8, 2006. http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/may06/tables.27to34.html gives the mean 9 month annual salary of a professor in USA as $118,401 corresponding to a monthly salary of $13,156. The professor in USA has the freedom to earn during the other 3 months, and thus we divide the 9 month salary by 9 to arrive at the average monthly salary. The best institutions in India are the Indian Institutes of Technologies. They offer salaries decided by the Government of India. A professor gets a minimum of Rs.18,400 to a maximum of Rs. 22,400 per month. (http://www.iitg.ernet.in/adv2005/fac_advt.htm). The average salary is Rs. 20,400 per month. From http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html we find one US Dollar is worth Rs. 45.91. The monthly salary of a professor of Computer Science in India in USD is $444 per month. Apparently a professor in US earns about 30 times the salary of a professor in India. Is the standard of life in USA then 30 times that in India? We need to look at per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to find the relative standards of life. One source of GDP values is http://www.finfacts.com/biz10/globalworldincomepercapita.htm The US per capita income in 2004 was $41,400 whereas that of India was $620, giving a standard of life in USA to be 67 times that of India. This means a professor in India is relatively better off by a factor of 2 compared to the relative standard in USA. This should not be taken to mean that the Indian professor is better off. It simply means the average Indian has a very low standard of life compared to an average American. We believe that education should offer the same level of financial difficulty irrespective of the country; that is, if a student in USA spends about 10% of the US GDP for one year of education, a student in India also spends about 10% of the Indian GDP. As and when we start charging fees, we hope to maintain the %GDP parity among students of different countries.
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