[jiggy2011]

I would imagine that the best Indian programmers are every bit as good as the best American or European programmers. It's just that at the low end, people who are not good programmers in first world countries will gravitate towards something else as there are plenty of other ways of a making a similar level of income whereas in India options are more limited so people will stick with a career to which they may be ill suited.

From what I've seen Scandinavian countries seems to have a very good track record for creating innovative programmers. A disproportionate number of highly original languages , frameworks , software and games seem to come from there.