So, how far will a PhD get me?

This is a quesiton that I face quite often, mostly because most people I know have PhD's in engineering, or are considering one.

Your work profile will be very similar to what you would expect in the US.

One one side, there are all the academic institutes: IIT's, IISc, TIFR, etc. If you didn't know education might well be one of the growing sectors in India. Case in point: Through all my growing up years, there were two branches of PSBB (the one in KK Nagar, and the "Main" branch), and one branch of the Delhi Public School (in Delhi, as you might expect.) Today, PSBB has opened up a few branches in Chennai, and even one in Coimbatore that I know of. And DPS, surprisingly, has three branches in Bangalore.

Back to University level education: At this point, we've opened up many more IIT's. The government has just introduced a bill allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India. Universities like Stanford, Harvard and Yale have expressed interest. BITS has opened up a few new campuses. Some of the big industrial houses have also expressed interest in setting up world class universities in India.

The Indian government itself has announced plans to establish 14 world class innovation universities in India.

You see all this, and you know that you will be well placed as an academic in India. From the research point of view, there is a lot of work that needs to be done here, and not enough people to work on it. So getting a grant from government labs will be easier that in the US.

There is a lot of private/industrial research that goes on too: GE, GM, Intel, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Shell have very good research centers in India. There is a lot of good work that happens here, that is amply recorded by way of publications and patents.

And, of course, there is the question of India being one of the world's biggest markets right now. With a little creativity on your part, the potential is endless.