Indian IT cos take Americans on board

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, according to media reports.

"The work we're doing requires more and more knowledge of the customers' businesses, and you want local people to do that," said, Wipro Chairman Azim H Premji.

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 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," S Padmanabhan, human resources chief for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), 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).