NEW DELHI -- They call her India's Miss Manners, and she is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar industry to make Indian companies more competitive globally by improving their workers' social skills.

Pria Warrick has become the guru of graces for a new generation of call-center techies, chief executives, animation artists, MBAs and Bollywood film stars, all of whom are helping drive India's rise as a world economic power but sometimes without a certain polish.

"Backs straight! Napkins on lap. Great. Class, cut your burger neatly," Warrick told a class of young Indian professionals, methodically performing fork-and-knife surgery on a McAloo Tikka patty -- a spicy potato burger from McDonald's -- as practice for dining in Europe and the United States.

Warrick's school is part of a fast-growing trend in corporate India to remedy what analysts and recruiters call a serious impediment to India's global economic goals. Although many skilled Indian workers have degrees from top universities, analysts said they are often jaw-droppingly inept at the basics of international workplace etiquette: dressing properly, hosting a meeting, making inoffensive small talk and even using cutlery.

Fearing that such deficiencies are hurting India's leadership potential, companies are spending millions of dollars on corporate finishing school for tens of thousands of workers. In many cases, those workers are products of India's burgeoning middle classes who are the first generation in their families to enter the nation's booming and globally minded economy.

NEW DELHI—After several weeks studying the selling points of photocopiers, printers and scanners, Surej Pillai scribbled notes as he digested another key business lesson — the importance of chewing his food with his mouth closed.

On a recent weekday morning in New Delhi, 28-year-old Pillai was participating alongside seven colleagues in a business etiquette class organized by the Japanese electronics company Canon for newly hired marketing executives.

“Remember, when you talk while you eat more air comes in, and it’s a scientific fact that makes you burp. That’s rude,” lectured Deepti Sharma, an instructor at the Pria Warrick Finishing Academy, which has provided training for a host of Indian companies.

From an economic standpoint, there’s little arguing that India has come of age. Its economy is roaring at an enviable 9 per cent clip and companies based here are widening their influence throughout the world.

Yet executives fear some young professionals are ill prepared for their country’s expansion because India’s education system places such a priority on academics over embracing social graces. They worry that lack of awareness of western manners could lead to an inappropriate action or déclassé remark that, in some extreme cases, could even sideline future business.

So a rapidly increasing number of companies are sending employees to Warrick and other etiquette experts to learn everything from the proper business handshake and dining etiquette to dressing for success and recovering if you forget someone’s name during a business meeting.

According to some estimates, more than half of the India’s three million college graduates attend finishing schools. Warrick is widely known here as India’s Miss Manners. In 2004, she hosted a reality show called “Indian Hospitality School,” working to transform four British slobs who travelled to New Delhi for a few weeks.

“In India we have such technical expertise, but when it comes to manners we take a back seat,” said Warrick.Pillai nodded in agreement.

“I think with the cultural differences between India and the West, especially with dining, this is a very good idea,” he said. “No one wants to be seen by their client as being rude.”

Unlike Westerners, many Indians share food at the dinner table and dishes often served with curries and gravies are eaten by hand. “We didn’t grow up knowing you break apart a dinner roll with your hands instead of using a dinner roll,” one Canon employee said during a break. While her students smirked or grinned at times during the all-day class, Warrick was all business when it came to demanding proper posture, quick responses and firm handshakes from her audience. “We want no limp fish handshakes,” Warrick said sternly, wearing a black dress and strand of pearls. “That shows a lack of confidence and is completely unacceptable.

“Your personal life plays an important role in the growth of your career,” she continued. “The western world is not as emotionally secure as we are in India. They say please and thank-you and sorry. We never use these words, but they are part of international culture.”

And you need to learn them, was her unspoken message.

Her eight students ranged in age from 28 to 35 and each had previous business experience with large Indian companies such as Reliance Industries before their hiring by Canon.

Yet all of them struggled with Warrick’s rapid-fire true-or-false and multiple-choice quizzes. None, for instance, said they knew it’s considered rude in the West to ask someone’s weight or salary, questions that are commonplace in India.

“Who goes through a revolving door first, the host or his guests?” Warrick asked.

Her audience stumped, Warrick explained guests precede their hosts through all doors—except revolving ones. “So you greet them when they come out the other side,” she explained.

Another question: “If you drop your fork during a meal in a restaurant, do you start using your client’s when he is not looking, wipe it off and keep eating, hand it to your server and ask for another or leave it on the ground and ask for another?”

The class answer, hand it to the server was wrong. “It’s a paid service,” she said. “You don’t want to be down on your hands and knees picking up a dirty fork. Maybe you do that at your home, but not in a restaurant.”

By lunchtime, Warrick handed off the class to her colleagues to head across town to the public-sector Indian Oil Company to enlighten a group of 60 young engineers and lawyers on the art of manners.

But before she left Pillai and his colleagues, Warrick offered a few more tips — don’t write on people’s business cards in front of them and, for goodness sake, don’t put them in your back pocket and sit on them.

“There is nothing more insulting,” she said with a smile.