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 as 'reverse-offshoring', a new report names India's largest offshoring firm Tata Consultancy Service Ltd (TCS) and software giants Infosys and Wipro among the IT firms which have re-employed some American workers, who had been laid off in their country, 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 each. Cities on its shortlist include Austin, Texas and Atlanta because of their deep tech-talent pools and reasonable salary costs, leading business magazine Businessweek says.
"The work we're doing requires more and more knowledge of the customers' businesses, and you want local people to do that," Businessweek quoted Wipro Chairman Azim H Premji 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.
They acknowledge that 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). And it plans to hire an additional 2,000 Americans within three years. Surprisingly, Businessweeksays, 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 typically have to provide the Indians with housing and the retirement benefits cost more because of India's social security contribution requirements.
Also, as the Indian 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 up by 12 per cent to 15 per cent per year, although they remain less than a third of those in the US.
The Indians, says Businessweek, 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.
"I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity, especially because they send you abroad for training," Brian Oswald, a 23-year-old Rutgers University graduate with a 2006 degree in industrial engineering who joined TCS in February, was quoted as saying.
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