While Americans and Britons worry about the loss of call center and technology jobs to countries like India, here it has led to a boom in people seeking to master English, the language that is seen as a ticket to economic freedom.

"English is the link language, the language of power and wealth in India. Those who do not speak and write good English will be unable to access the wired, electronic-age India," said Prashant Bhardwaj, 23, a manager in a General Electric call center that employs more than 1,000 people in Gurgaon, a satellite town of Delhi.

According to research by the consulting firm Deloitte and Touche, Western nations will have outsourced 2 million mainly administrative and tech-related jobs by 2008, and India will be main beneficiary. Gartner Inc., a technology forecasting firm, has said that one out of 10 jobs in the U.S. computer services and software industry could shift to lower-cost emerging markets such as India or Russia by end of 2004.

The downturn in the tech sector in the last couple of years has quelled the flood of Indian software professionals going to the United States. Now U.S. companies are hiring low-cost educated workers overseas as never before, to tide them over the recession.

Whereas acquiring coding and programming skills required time, effort and money, joining the current technology-services boom requires just one asset - a working knowledge of English to handle back-office administrative work or the right accent to handle verbal inquiries from customers in the United States or anywhere else in the anglophone world.

Most Indians are exposed to English as they grow up, because of a large and powerful English broadcast and print media. But for those who want tuition, language coaching centers have proliferated across India. They offer special teaching packages for those who want service jobs in the call center, medical, telecom, insurance and banking sectors. Coaching centers use innovative methods such as playing Scrabble, listening to the BBC and CNN, and watching soaps such as "Friends." The students range in age from 25 to retired individuals.

Vivekananda Institute, one such coaching center, has more than 85 franchises all over India. A spokesperson of the institute says that more than 210,000 students have been taught English.

A recent editorial in a national newspaper said that a tide of English is sweeping India. A British linguist, David Dalby, has predicted that India will soon become "the center of gravity of the English language," with the largest number of English speakers.

The economics of learning English speaks for itself. English-speakers can earn from 10,000 rupees, or $200, to 20,000 rupees a month, which can provide a good living in a country with an average per capita monthly income of less than $50.

The mounting losses of service jobs is becoming a hot political issue in the United States, with bills put forward in five U.S. states that would require workers hired under state contracts to be American citizens. But analysts in India are not worried. "Multinational corporations will be driven by cost cuts," India's finance minister, Jawant Singh, said recently.

The biggest fear is China. In a possible threat to India's prowess in the information-technology field, China is fast rising as a service outsourcing hub and could catch up with India by 2007, according to Business Week. China is joining English-speaking countries like India and Philippines as key destination for outsourced service jobs.

The other worry is cultural. Kenneth Keniston, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the gap between empowered English-speakers and relatively powerless non-English speakers will devalue local languages and culture. The non-English speaking population risks being left out of the information age.

But for now, more and more Indians have just one agenda: reciting "She sells sea shells by the sea shore," without twisting their tongues.