Business process outsourcing (BPO) specialist ICICI, an Indian company which performs administrative, accounting and other back-office functions for large corporations, announced last week that it is to locate two call centres in Northern Ireland. ICICI plans to employ over 1,000 people at the two sites, one in Belfast and another at a location yet to be decided. The jobs announcement from ICICI is the third from an Indian company in the North since last September.

ICICI's rival HCL and Polaris, a software company, have both located business units in Northern Ireland in recent months.

Trevor Killen, Invest NI's director for Ireland, said the arrival of the three Indian companies, which have pledged to create 1,750 jobs between them, is something the development body is keen to build on.

"We have been making an effort to attract companies in India in both BPO and software, " he said. "We would be hopeful that there will be more in the pipeline, " Killen added.

IDA spokesman George Bennett said the Republic is also trying to attract investment from India but that it was looking at different companies from its Northern Irish counterpart.

"We're not competing for the cost-driven, large scale processing operations, " he said.

Bennett said the IDA was hopeful that a number of Indian companies could be encouraged to locate their European headquarters in the Republic much as US companies such as Google and Ebay had set up operations in Dublin as part of their expansion into the EU.

Bennett said he didn't see any Indian companies that were at that stage yet, however.

"Do I see a project from India appearing in Ireland in the next six months? No I don't. But comfortably within in the next three years, " he said.