DAVOS, Switzerland
As India and China have grown rapidly in recent years, there has been no shortage of forecasts of protectionist backlashes in the developed world, although the actual effect of those complaints has been minor.

But now there is talk of a different threat.

“Backlash within India is a bigger problem,” said Kris Gopalakrishnan, a co-founder and president of Infosys, an Indian company that has become one of the biggest winners from the era of globalization. Its stock price has quintupled in less than four years, and over the last 12 months it has hired 22,000 people.

“There is one part of India which is rapidly growing and another part that is being left behind,” he said in an interview here. “In the last round of Indian elections,” both at the national and state levels, “any chief minister who was seen as pro-business lost.”

At the World Economic Forum here this week, business and government leaders have celebrated what they see as the success of globalization. Unemployment is low around the world, and growth is strong. Worries about a United States slowdown have faded, and even the self-appointed pessimist on one panel of economists here, Nouriel Roubini of Roubini Global Economics, saw the threat in the United States as being a “growth recession” rather than a real recession. In such a downturn, the American economy would see a few quarters of growth below 1 percent.

If a few years ago the big question about China was whether it would have a hard landing or a soft one, now no one sees any landing at all. Instead, there are questions about what it will do with all that money. Zhu Min, an official of the Bank of China, offered assurances that China would not have trouble managing another $200 billion in foreign currency reserves that it will add this year.
And Montek S. Ahluwalia, a member of the Indian government as deputy chairman of the state planning commission, can talk of being dissatisfied with an economic growth rate of over 8 percent, promising to raise it to 10 percent within five years. A few years ago, a growth rate of 8 percent would have seemed like a wonderful dream.

But the growth has come, and with it concern about unequal distribution. Mr. Gopalakrishnan said 37 percent of Indians are illiterate, and more than 30 percent live in poverty. Infosys, which prospered from the outsourcing of technical work from companies in the developed world, played a role in India’s growth. But its direct benefits remain restricted to the most educated sectors of Indian society, even if it does reach further down the education hierarchy than it once did. A decade ago, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said, Infosys hired 90 percent of its new employees from the top tier of Indian universities. Now that proportion is down to about 10 percent, simply because there is a lot of competition for the graduates of those colleges.

Instead, it hires most of its new employees from 200 Indian colleges, and puts all new workers through a 16-week training program that leads to about 4 percent of them failing. It also hires workers from the countries where it seeks contracts, including 130 in the last year from American colleges. It is trying to become more of a strategic consultant to its clients, a plan that requires more local knowledge.

But even as Infosys and other Indian companies have prospered, they have contributed to rising inequality in India — in part by helping to bid up salaries for those who get top jobs — and Infosys now seeks workers willing to take less than it pays in India.

Mr. Gopalakrishnan said Infosys aimed at having about 30 percent of the work on its typical contract done in the country where the client is, and the rest done remotely. All of that remote work used to be done in India, but now Infosys has added locations in China, Mauritius and the Czech Republic, and is looking for a location in Latin America.

It is not hard to imagine an Indian politician denouncing that strategy in terms that would be familiar to Ross Perot. And that explains why it is not enough to say that globalization has produced unprecedented growth.

“Democratic societies,” said Laura D’Andrea Tyson, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “need to have a population that feels the benefits from this process are shared by them.”

And that is no sure thing, even in India. “It is an amazing time,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said, pointing to the rapid economic growth in much of the world. “How long it will last is anybody’s guess.”