Nasscom to urge top IT firms in US to influence new administration to be liberal with work visas

Nasscom, India’s trade body for IT sector, said it would exhort top companies such as Facebook, IBM and Google to prevail over the new American administration headed by President Donald Trump to take a more liberal view of the visa regime for foreign information technology (IT) workers.

Business Standard quotes R Chandrashekar, Nasscom President, as saying that after the new administration settles down, they would take a delegation to the US.

The IT trade association contends that US companies would retain their competitive edge and create more jobs if they continued to outsource to India. India houses more than 1,000 global IT companies, of which most of them are American. When they set up shops in India, they began producing products, applications and services at lower costs.

The aforementioned three IT companies avail services of a workforce of slightly more than 800,000 and generate $19 billion, which makes up around 20 percent of India's software exports.

When Nassscom was founded in 1988, IT sector’s income was less than $1 billion. Currently, the sector is generating $143 billion, of which exports make up $108 billion. It thus contributes to 9.5 percent of India’s GDP (gross domestic product). This new economy sector’s contribution alone to India’s total services export was 45 percent in 2015-16.

Of the around 1,200 members of Nasscom, 200 are global enterprises, including Intel and Accenture. In fact, a third of IBM’s global employees are based out of India, it was stated.

According to the trade body, in 2018, America will face a shortage of more than a million IT professionals. It also stated that almost half of the students pursuing education STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses in US universities are foreigners.

Shivendra Singh, Nasscom’s vice-president, said that IT supports about 400,000 US jobs. He added that the top seven leading Indian IT companies make use of only 13 percent of the H1B visas that are issued by the US.

If you are looking to migrate to the US, contact Y-Axis, India’s renowned immigration consultancy firm, to apply for a work visa from one of its several offices located in major cities of the country.