According to Tuesday"s IBM annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the work force at International Business Machines Corporation grew 8% in 2006, with most of the rise coming in India. IBM noted that at the end of 2006 it employed a total of 355,766 people, up from 329,373 one year earlier. Its base in India was 52,000 people, up from 36,000 a year ago. Three years earlier, IBM had just 9,000 people there, before the company dramatically stepped up its efforts to lower costs by doing more software development, services work and customer support from India. That makes India the second-largest center for IBM, trailing only the United States, where IBM"s work force rose slightly to 127,000.