I'm somewhat nervous about posting this due to its somewhat sensitive nature, but I'd like to share my own experiences with Indian programming students, and perhaps some of you who are more familiar with the education system in the country could provide some background info for me. As in, the following is definitely not meant to be any sort of judgement, because I'm relatively clueless and there is significant selection bias to the data my perspective affords.

I'm involved with programming mentoring program in a large open source community, KDE. A significant percentage of the mentoring requests I receive, I'd say about half of them, are by Indian CS students, often in their second or third year of college education. On average, they share the following attributes:

* They're nice and polite people, and, a sometimes significant language barrier aside, nice to work with.

* Unfortunately, their education level as pertaining to the programming practice tends to be far below that of Western students who have spent a similar amount of time in CS college education. They've had, say, C++ classes, but their understanding even of OOP basics tends to be lacking, not to mention groking something like an event loop. This is not necessarily a fatal problem considering that receiving programming mentoring is the point of the mentoring program, but we don't quite have the resources to make up for it all -- the idea is more to focus on helping with KDE specifics than general programming.

* Many of them seem to have been explicitly encouraged to participate in international open source projects by their institution. Some appear to do it in order to receive credit from the institution.

* Most of them expect to be told what to work on, and there is a distinct edge of subservience to their communication style with us that you don't see from non-Indian mentees. Often, the first step is to explain how the nature of our community really allows them to choose to work on what they find interesting, or where they perceive a project could need their help the most after making social contact with the developer and user communities and observing the existing pain points. Unfortunately, no matter how gently this is laid out, this is also the step after which we never hear back from many of them: The agency to self-select and self-motivate seems to be lacking.

Of course, for completeness' sake I should also mention that there definitely are exceptions. I've also mentored Indian CS students who are exceedingly bright and who have later become valuable contributors in the community. Our first conference in India was also a great success: http://dot.kde.org/2011/03/10/confkdein-opens-bengaluru and http://dot.kde.org/2011/03/12/confkdein-talks-close-kde-lege...