IT cos go slow on H-1B visas

India’s second-largest information technology services provider, Infosys Technologies, has applied for a mere 405 visas till date for financial year 2009-10 — its lowest application count in recent years.

While the company did not provide figures for the comparable quarter of the last financial year, HR head and member of the Infosys board, Mohandas Pai, confirmed that “the number of visa applications this year has come down, essentially because demand is down and so is the volume of work”.

The company made 4,800 H-1B visa applications in the financial year ending March 31, 2009 (the cost of one H-1B visa is said to be around $3,000 — around Rs 1.45 lakh). On a cumulative basis, Infosys had 8,700 H-1B visa holders on its rolls as of December 31, 2008. This came down to 8,200 by March 31, 2009. “We are self-sufficient on the visa front,” noted Pai.

Infosys reasons that client budgets are now more short-term in nature, which requires fewer onsite employees than in the past. Infosys’ top rivals, TCS and Wipro, are said to have applied for fewer H-1B visa applications this year, too. While they refused to divulge the numbers, the top three IT firms are understood to have recalled about 1,000 workers each in the June quarter as part of greater offshore leverage.

Moreover, the recently-introduced Grassley-Durbin Bill in the US aims to set tougher wage standards, which may increase salaries for H-1B workers, as well as impose limits on the number of visa workers to 50 per cent of the workforce. In a bid to meet these requirement and hire more locals (read foreigners), Infosys will hire more than 1,000 people from outside India in 2009-10.

All these factors have resulted in even the current year’s H-1B visa quota of 65,000 not being filled. As of July 10, approximately 44,900 applications were filed against the application cap for the fiscal 2010 programme. Compare this with the figures in 2007 and 2008, when the 65,000 cap was met in under two days.