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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=technology&res=9504EED61E3AF93BA15757C0A9629C8B63

Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised.

''For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far,'' said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. The ''depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough'' among Indian programmers, the executive said.

If it sounds like ''Made in the U.S.A.'' jingoism, consider this: The entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is Indian. He was born and raised near Bombay and received his master's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in that city, now known as Mumbai. Mr. Kurande is not alone in his views on ''outsourcing'' technology work to India. As more companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India's ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies -- ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India -- are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.

For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs.

''Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced -- what can be set down as a set of rules,'' said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass. ''That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance.''

Another Indian executive in the United States who has soured on outsourcing is Dev Ittycheria, the chief executive of Bladelogic, a designer of network management software with 70 workers, also in Waltham. Bladelogic, which has a client list that includes General Electric and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out -- one to install an operating system across a network, another to keep tabs on changes done to the system -- could be done faster and at a lower cost in the United States.

That was true even though programmers in India cost Bladelogic $3,500 a month versus a monthly cost of $10,000 for programmers in the United States. ''The cost savings in India were three to one,'' Mr. Ittycheria said. ''But the difference in productivity was six to one.''

Bladelogic's chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated in India, predicts that once the ''hype cycle'' about Indian outsourcing runs its course, projects will come back to the United States ''when people find that their productivity goals have not been met.''

The upshot is that high-technology corporations are likely to ship more and more business functions to India to take advantage of its well-trained work force. However, even as they do so they will keep many essential tasks here.

For instance, Storability Software, which designs systems to manage data storage and has 25 employees in the United States, first tried to outsource some core programming tasks to a big software contractor in India. When that did not work, it tried a more specialized boutique. When this company did not deliver up to Storability's specifications either, the company hired four programmers in the United States to help rewrite the code.