US to soon address H1B visa issue

Indian information technology industry is expecting a relief from the rejection of US visas for its employees, as the US Government may soon come out with a concrete plan to resolve the issues.

The US Government is planning to come out with a corrected norms within this year for sheer collaboration of works between both the countries.

Meanwhile, the US Government is also planning to set up different language schools so that its people can also work abroad. “To start with, we are starting with 20 schools within this year in Delaware where we are introducing two languages to start with — Chinese and Spanish — in 10 each schools and later on this will be expanded with more different languages spoken globally,” Jack A Markell, Governor, State of Delaware told

Business Line here. Speaking at the Nasscom Leadership Forum here, he said few 100 people will be trained for these languages to start with. He also said it is important to make sure that the American people also contribute more to other global countries including India.

Reacting to the step forward on the Visa issues, Som Mittal, President, Nasscom said the US Government was already doing a lot to reform their visa processes, but there should be a concrete new reform.

“The US Government has to change all immigration norms. Until they tweak it comprehensively, the issue will not resolve. It will take a little while, but it should be concrete as they already are short of skilled people,” he said.

The new norms may also resolve the rejection rate of H1B visas (a non-immigrant visa in the US that allows US employers to temporarily employ skilled foreign workers) from around 30-40 per cent right now.

“The new norms may raise also raise limit of H1B visas provided to Indian companies to around 1.15 lakh per year,” Krishnakumar Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mindtree, said. Right now, the limit is of 65,000 H1B visas a year.

However, it is too early to expect anything right now, said N. Chandrasekaran, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Tata Consultancy Services.

But, Markell was positive about the new norms to be introduced and said the US Government may announce something even earlier instead of doing it around end this year since the elections are also over now.

He said there could be lot of collaboration in the education space also just like Indian School of Business (ISB) Hyderabad has done with US universities, where lot of students from the US come to study here.