Indian companies hiring in US

NEW YORK: Indian companies, which are becoming major players in the International arena, are hiring aggressively in the United States, reversing the earlier trend when they always transferred Indians to work in America on temporary visas. Terming it reverse “offshoring”, a new report names India’s largest offshoring firm Tata Consultancy Service Ltd (TCS) and software giants Infosys and Wipro among them and saying some American workers laid off are now re-employed in Indian outfits after training in India.

Wipro Ltd, for instance, is scouting US locations for two big software writing centers that eventually could employ hundreds of programmers each. 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 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 Businessweek as saying. Today only 2.5% of Wipro’s global workforce is non-Indian, but the company wants to boost that to more than 10%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 the trend might ease tensions as the Senate mulls regulations that would require companies applying for H-1B visas—temporary working papers for foreigners—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,” says HR chief for Tata Consultancy Services S Padmanabhan. TCS is India’s largest outsourcing firm, said. About 1,000 of TCS’s 10,000 US-based workers are Americans (out of 90,000 total employees worldwide).

And it plans to hire an additional 2,000 Americans within three years. Surprisingly, BusinessWeek 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.