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Mohandas Pai
Former Infosys CFO and industry veteran Mohandas Pai on Saturday said the US move to impose a steep USD 100,000 annual fee on H-1B visa applicants will dampen fresh applications by companies and may accelerate offshoring in coming months. US President Donald Trump has signed a proclamation that will impose USD 100,000 annual visa fee for highly skilled workers. The H-1B nonimmigrant visa programme was created to bring temporary workers into the US to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labour, Trump said in the proclamation. Dismissing the notion that companies use H-1B visas to send cheap labour to the US, Pai pointed out that the average salary paid by the top 20 H-1B employers exceeds USD 100,000, and criticised what he termed as misplaced "rhetoric carrying on." An IT industry expert who did not wish to be named said that the fresh approvals for Indian
Industry veteran and former CFO of Infosys, Mohandas Pai on Thursday said Indian IT firms' dependence on H-1B visas has come down significantly over the years, and that data indicates many leading American tech companies are among the top applicants for these visas. There was no official word from IT industry association Nasscom after US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made scathing remarks on these work visas meant for highly-skilled professionals describing the H-1B visa programme as "scam". Emails to top Indian IT companies including TCS, Infosys and Wipro for comments, too, did not elicit any response. "The current H-1B visa system is a scam that lets foreign workers fill American job opportunities. Hiring American workers should be the priority of all great American businesses. Now is the time to hire American," Lutnick said in a social media post this week. When contacted, Pai asserted that Indian IT companies are less dependent on these ..
Indian startups are being held back by a lack of adequate domestic investment due to restrictive regulations of the government, according to industry veteran and Aarin Capital Chairman Mohandas Pai, who called for policy reforms and R&D investments to strengthen the ecosystem. Despite India being the world's third-largest startup hub, Pai cautioned that the country risks falling behind in global innovation unless these challenges are addressed. "We have 1,65,000 registered startups, 22,000 are funded. They created USD 600 billion in value. We got 121 unicorns, maybe 250-300 soonicorns. "The biggest issue for startups is the lack of adequate capital. For example, China invested USD 835 billion in startups and ventures between 2014 and 2024, US invested USD 2.32 trillion. We just put in USD 160 billion, out of which possibly 80 per cent came from overseas. So local capital is not coming in," Pai said in an interview to PTI. Pai pointed out that, unlike the US, where insurance ...
Industry veteran T V Mohandas Pai has said startups which do almost all their business in India and have all their employees here should resist any pressure from large investors to domicile outside, as the former Infosys director and chairman of Aarin Capital cited key lessons to be drawn from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Pai advised founders of India-centric startups "to be careful" and "not get carried away" by investors who force companies they fund, to domicile in the US and open bank accounts there as well. Pai said Silicon Valley Bank was a startup-friendly bank and its collapse is a "blow" to the startup ecosystem. "Just how big is the blow, is something that we have to watch from startup to startup, and founder to founder," Pai told PTI. He added that the exposure of Indian startup ecosystem to Silicon Valley Bank is not too high. Pai has a word of advice for entrepreneurs and founders -- startups whose businesses are centered around India and have very little to do