NEW DELHI, 15 April 2006 — Along with the software gurus migrating to India’s tech hubs as part of what some call a reverse brain drain, an unexpected lot — young, single Indian women — are heading back to India too.

While it is difficult to gauge just how many Indians are returning to India each year, a popular joke at parties these days is that the acronym NRI no longer stands for “non-resident Indian” but for “newly-returned Indian.”

According to the technology industry body NASSCOM, about 40,000 returned in the five years from 2001 to 2005 to work in technology jobs in India. But they represent only the most visible face of a larger phenomenon in a wide range of sectors as India’s economy booms.

Two years ago, Sumana Boothalingam, 30, finally took the step that she had been mulling over for years. After five years working in public relations in New York City, she bought a one-way ticket to India and switched to journalism.

“New York got kind of boring,” said Boothalingam, adding that the atmosphere in the United States also changed, becoming less open after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I felt it would be forced to set down roots abroad,” said Boothalingam.

But women who move to India without the protective shield of a husband and children can find that everything from renting an apartment to taking a walk is a challenging experience.

Boothalingam went from living with a roommate in New York City and taking the metro at all hours to living with her retired parents and worrying about how she would get home at night in a city considered very unsafe for women.

“I definitely had that deer-in-the-headlights look my first weeks here,” recalled wavy-haired Boothalingam, who has lived very little in India since moving at 16 with her family to England.

New considerations — like worrying what the maid will think if a male friend comes over — make dating “a logistical nightmare,” said Boothalingam.

For women with few ties in the city, the logistics of finding a place to live are just as difficult.

“Basically they think a single woman is sort of a woman of ill-repute, like she’ll have a stream of men coming back and forth,” said Anita Jain, 32, a financial journalist, who looked at 40 places before landing an apartment.

“It was something I did not expect because you think if you have the money you should be able to buy the goods,” said Jain, who grew up in the United States but moved to the Indian capital last June.

In marriage-centric India, workingwomen in their late twenties and thirties who work and live on their own are still viewed with curiosity, and sometimes with suspicion.

Some have adjusted by occasionally allowing friends to take on parental roles they would never tolerate elsewhere.

“It’s extreme in Delhi. I find I’m comforted that my landlord and his wife want to meet the taxi driver before I get in,” said Rita Soni, 37, a development professional who moved to the city two months ago to work for a startup NGO. “If my mother did that I’d be like ‘are you crazy?’ “ By virtue of leading lives that many in India would consider “alternative” — centering around work and friends rather than marriage — many have found it hard to befriend Indian women in their age group.

“The more modest down-to-earth people lack experience” in common with her, making it hard to truly relate to each other, said California-raised Vaneeta Ahuja, a teacher at the American Embassy School.

“And the people with more of a parallel experience to mine tend to be pretentious,” perhaps because they often tend to belong to the elite classes, she added.

At work too, female professionals may not always face a warm welcome at first.

Malini Rao, a networking specialist who worked in the telecom industry in New York City for six years, remembers frequently being told “it can’t be done in India” when she made suggestions at work.

“Six months later the market would go in that direction and they would end up doing it,” said Rao, who returned to her native New Delhi three years ago.

“People were very nonreceptive to me and my ideas to begin with and I really had to prove myself for a long time for them to begin respecting me.” Yet, for all its difficulties, many of the women who have moved to Delhi said they had no regrets.

For Jain, India provided a sense of homecoming. “I was drawn to a social intimacy people might have here or warmth that I didn’t feel I had in the United States. I definitely did find that.” Boothalingam, who switched careers and now anchors a morning show on the newly-launched CNN-IBN news channels, says India has become an exciting place to be.

“Ten years ago it would have been really different, but now other people are coming back,” she said.

“At a time when America is going through upheaval, if you are Indian and have a foothold here, it’s the best time to come back.”