Infosys, TCS saw H-1B trouble looming even before Trump came to power in US

Infy CEO Sikka has said in April last year that he wanted to move co away from visa dependency

Even as the Trump administration accuses Infosys and TCS of unfairly cornering the lion's share of H-1B visas, the two Indian information technology (IT) majors have been reducing their dependency on the visa system from before Trump took office. 

“We continue to be influenced by the visa issue situation. Our view is to become independent of visas and hire locally,” Vishal Sikka, chief executive officer of Infosys had told Business Standard in April 2016. (Read more)

Both companies appear to have had sensed the changing political mood in Washington in advance of Trump's victory, and, in fact when Trump's chances of winning were considered quite slim.

“Even before this latest executive order, it is clear that the Indian service provider industry was taking steps to reduce their dependency on H-1B, as reflected by the drop in overall applications for H-1B from 236,000 last year to 199,000 this year. The majority of this reduction is thought to be the reduced number of applications that the service providers are submitting,” says Peter Bendor-Samuel, chief executive officer of Everest Group, a global information technology researcher. (Read more)
 

The Trump administration, for its part, has accused TCS and Infosys of unfairly cornering the lion's share of H-1B visas by putting extra tickets in the lottery system (Read more). The accusation came even as President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to reform the H-1B visas norms by replacing the lottery system with a merit-based immigration policy.  

TCS and Infy started taking steps early

According to Infosys Chief Operating Officer U B Pravin Rao, the IT major has focused on increasing its presence in the US with a lot more local hiring in the past 24 months. The company is also looking at setting up development and training centres in the country as part of its efforts to tide over visa-related issues. (Read more) 

In fact, back In 2015-16, the company hired 2,144 people in North and South Americas, which was more than a quarter of its employee base in the region at the end of 2014-15. This was the largest addition of local employees by Infosys in the region. (Read more)  

While serving as the CEO of TCS, Tata Sons Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran had said that the company began preparing for a “visa-constrained regime” more than a year ago.

India's largest software exporter, TCS, has said that it has reduced the number of visas it has applied for over the past few years. Further, the company said that it has several local development centres in the US and has been hiring local engineers.

"In the last four or five years, we have been recruiting heavily in the US," Girish Ramachandran, head of Asia Pacific region of TCS, told Reuters in an interview. (Read more)  

In fact, TCS applied for only 2,000 H-1B visas in 2016, compared to 14,000 visas in 2015. More recently, TCS Chief Operating Officer N G Subramaniam said that the company's strategy was to move to a regime where its operating model would be visa-neutral. (Read more) 

In the immediate context, while responding to the accusations made during a White House briefing last week, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) said that Indian IT service entities accounted for less than a fifth of H-1B visas in America. The Indian IT industry's apex body also said that the two top companies -- TCS and Infosys -- got only 8.8 per cent of H-1B visas for placement of workers in the United States. (Read more)