At Rs 8 lakh per annum, Pune has highest paid technical writers

(News item that appeared in the Pune edition of The Indian Express dated July 16, 2007)

Ranjini Raghavan

Pune, July 15: When Gururaj B.S started off his first job in 1997 in Delhi to write an instruction manual for data-entry operators on Linux, he got a monthly salary of Rs 2,500. A decade down the line he is a documentation manager and has a five digit hefty monthly package.

Pune, for the third time in a row, is the city with the highest pay package for technical writers, the average being Rs 8,37,694 lakh per annum.

This and other interesting facts about the profession were revealed at the Regional Conference for Society for Technical Communicators-India, attended by over 100, here on Sunday.

The fourth salary survey of Indian technical communicators released at the conference reported a 55 per cent rise over the past two years. The entry level salaries improved by 65 per cent since 2005. Pune offered the highest pay package, while Hyderabad and Bangalore were runners-up.

Paresh Naik, who conducted the survey, attributed the higher pay packages in Pune to the presence of a greater number of product development companies compared to service IT companies. “Technical writing for products developed in India fetches greater returns as compared to writing for service companies which cater to products abroad,” he observed. He said service companies act like middlemen, an extra link in the profit chain who take their own cut from the profit margins before the money reaches the technical writer. “Though Pune seems to offer higher packages, Bangalore still has the largest number of technical communicators,” he added.

For the survey, Bangalore had the highest number of respondents at 113; Pune came next with 58. While the sample size of the survey is small — only 281 — this is still the only data available on the up to 10,000 strong technical writers in India. The survey was conducted online. Naik added that factors that determine salaries — initiative, skill level and quality of work — could not be reflected in the survey.

The exponential growth of the industry was termed as a mixture of both good and bad news. Naik termed it as “good for individuals but bad for the profession”. As the industry receives at least 53 per cent of its work from outsourcing, growing salaries in India will reduce the cost effectiveness of the industry.

However, Makarand Pandit of Pune-based Technowriters Pvt Ltd said that the industry was still in a transition stage and would stabilise in the next two to three years.