New York, June 19
Indian companies — which are becoming major players in the international arena — are hiring aggressively in the USA, reversing the earlier trend when they always transferred Indians to work in America on temporary visas.
Terming it reverse ‘off-shoring’, a new report names India’s largest off-shoring firm Tata Consultancy Service Ltd (TCS) and software giants Infosys and Wipro among them, saying some American workers are now re-employed in Indian outfits after training in India.
Wipro Ltd, for instance, is scouting US locations for two big software writing centres that eventually could employ hundreds of programmers. Cities on its short list include Austin, Tex, and Atlanta, because of their deep tech-talent pools and reasonable salary costs, the leading business magazine Business Week says.
“The work we’re doing requires more and more knowledge of the customers’ businesses and you want local people to do that,” Wipro chairman Azim H Premji is quoted by Business Week as saying. Today, only 2.5 per cent of Wipro’s global workforce is non-Indian, but the company wants to boost that to more than 10 per cent in a few years. The Indian outsourcers are quoted as saying that their US expansion plans predate the latest concerns over immigration and jobs.
But they acknowledge that the trend might ease tensions as the Senate mulls regulations that would require companies applying for H-1B visas to try hiring Americans first.
“If we can hire close to our clients, we don’t have to bring in somebody from India on an H-1B,” S Padmanabhan, human resources chief for TCS said.
About 1,000 of TCS’s 10,000 US-based workers are Americans. And it plans to hire an additional 2,000 Americans within three
years. Surprisingly, Business Week says, it often costs more to ship in Indians on a temporary basis than it does to hire Americans. Base salaries are comparable, because Indian companies must, by law, pay market rates for people they bring in on work visas.
But, the companies have to provide with housing and retirement benefits cost more because of India’s social security contribution requirements.
Also, as the rupee has risen more than 10 per cent against the dollar this year, hiring Americans has gotten cheaper. At the same time, fierce competition for tech talent in India is pushing salaries there up by 12 per cent to 15 per cent per year, although they remain less than a third of those in the USA.
The Indians, says Business Week, are recruiting a combination of fresh college grads and experienced veterans who have worked at American companies.
They’re especially active at campus job fairs, and unlike a few years ago students know who these companies are and respect them. In fact, the Indian connection has become an attraction. The US hiring, the magazine states, echoes the strategy Japan’s auto industry devised after soaring levels of imports sparked political outcry in Washington in December 2000.
— PTI
