US senators have introduced a legislation to cut the number of H-1B visas by 15,000.Bloomberg TV India caught up with Zensar Vice-Chairman & CEO Ganesh Natarajan to sense the pulse of IT companies.
It was expected that nothing was going to be announced before the US elections. But the Bill on H-1B visas has been moved. What are you making of this?
It is not true that nothing will be announced. There are always big rhetoric and big announcements just before elections. I do not think that anything will get passed this year. I don’t think there is enough time for the Obama administration to get a legislation passed, particularly if it is a standalone legislation like this current bill.
But I do think — and I have been saying this — that it does call for a rethink on the Indian industry model because I think the days are over when you could largely work with Indian resources working on both shores. You need to be very conscious of the fact that there is a global slowdown, economies will move towards more protection, so we need to think about what is our model, if it is going to be people-dependent or IP or intellectual property-dependent. If it is people-dependent, we should do our bit to ensure that there is local employment everywhere.
The US visa fee has been increased — almost doubled. All of this coming together, what is the impact going to be on the Indian IT sector?
I had the privilege of meeting Senator Grassley six years back when I was chairman of NASSCOM and his point is very clear and you can’t argue that point. He says that the H-1B Visa was designed such that if there are high skilled jobs for which people do not have resources available in the US, they can get a few (foreign) people in. Even if you look at the logic of this current Bill— we will give preference to people at the higher-end of the salary range — it kind of implements the original idea.
It is a fact and senators are very conscious of it that there aren’t enough people available in the US. So my point is if there are not enough people then they should allow people from India or where ever else. But if there are people available, then it is incumbent on the industry to recruit all those people. I think they have to take a very balanced step here.