‘Bengaluru is a synonym in Germany for R&D in digital world’

Philipp Ackermann has been serving in the German foreign service since 1993. With a PhD in art history, he has spent six years in India and recently visited Bengaluru for the inauguration of SAP Labs’ India Innovation Park in Devanahalli, the company’s largest research hub outside Germany. He is particularly fond of Bengaluru’s modern outlook, its can-do spirit, tech talent, and pleasant year-round weather, which draws him to the city three to four times annually. Ackermann shares his insights on the Indo-German partnership across various sectors, including science, technology, and defence, and German immigration policy.

Excerpts:

What will be the big milestones for India-Germany relations in the next five years? 

You will find Indo-German cooperation on basically every level of society, be that academia, business, climate change, cultural cooperation... And this partnership is at an all-time high right now, and we’ll see more of it in the coming years. 

First of all, business... We have about 2,200 German companies which set up shop in India, and one to two medium-sized companies from Germany a week that come to India to explore whether and how to set up shop in India. 

Another thing would be with regard to climate change and sustainability. Germany and India have concluded the Indo-German Green and Sustainable Development Partnership
(GSDP), one of whose aims is making urban living more sustainable and greener in India. 

A third priority is certainly migration. Germany is in dire need of skilled labour migration... Many understaffed sectors are very actively looking for talented people from India. Then there is the defence sector, where Germany and India are trying to develop new ways of cooperation.

Which German companies are investing in Bengaluru, and why?

Bengaluru, for us, is the R&D centre par excellence in India. When you see German business here, it’s mostly R&D. SAP has more engineers in India than in Germany. You see Mercedes with 8,000 engineers doing autonomous driving experiments and working on brakes. You have Bosch, which is more than 100 years old. You have Festo, also a car supplier. And Siemens Healthineers is building the biggest campus outside Germany here in Bengaluru. 

Bengaluru is a synonym in Germany for R&D in the digital world. The city of Berlin, which is a full-fledged German state, will open an office in Bengaluru next year in order to link the start-up scenes from here to the one in Berlin.

German investment bank KFW has financed the Bengaluru Metro project. It is also providing 500 million euros for the Bengaluru Suburban Railway Project. Do you regularly monitor the progress of these projects? 

We do collaborate with authorities, and it is monitored very thoroughly. Of course, we are not the engineers; we support the financing. We offer favourable interest rates, so we are very keen on observing the progress.

Is the fund release tied to the progress of the project?

The fund release is meticulously laid down in a contract between the organisation and KfW. There, all the steps have been laid out on how to monitor and at which speed to proceed.

How many skilled workers would Germany require in the next five years?

About 4 lakh a year. That’s not only from India; it is from all over the world. Germany has had very good experience with the three lakh Indians that are in Germany already. We know that some professions, like caregivers and nurses but also IT personnel, are particularly sought after. The average salary of the 300,000 Indians in Germany is higher than the average salary of a German in Germany.

What specific challenges do Indians face in Germany?

Our immigration law is Europe’s most modern. We recently introduced what we call the opportunity card; you can come to Germany without having a job offer. The idea is that you come to search for a job.

In the big cities and if you are in the IT sector, English is completely sufficient, but I would encourage everybody who moves to Germany to learn German to a certain level. And when you go into professions like caregiving or nursing, then German proficiency is a must.

You will see the Germans are a little reserved, but many Indians experience the German living a little stiff, but once they open up, they like it a lot. We are not the best communicators actually. But once you have somebody invited over to your place, he will be your friend forever. 

In Germany, you have excellent technical universities and old traditional schools that offer good training for free. And also, we do not monitor your social media accounts for your visa application.

We have 50,000 Indian students in Germany. It is the biggest non-German group of students in Germany. Once you graduate, you have 18 months to find a job. 

We have had very good experiences with Indian students, but I say don’t trust your agent. They try to push you to private universities that charge fees. You have 2,500 master’s degrees in public universities that charge only small administrative fees. Students can visit the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) website and check for courses in public universities. Its biggest India office is in Bengaluru.

How does Germany’s growing need for skilled workers align with the rise of far-right political parties?

We want fair and legal migration. We’ve been exposed to two waves of immigration because of our geographic situation, from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and recently Ukraine.

That is one reason why far-right political parties have grown so much. But these parties are not against migration
per se.