IT employees abroad gain from weak rupee
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 09 December 2008, 13:57 IST   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: While the weakening rupee is creating a ruckus for the companies in India, the employees who are abroad on short-term projects are in a beneficial position. The rupee fall will allow the employees to convert their dollars at a more favorable rate. IT employees, who work abroad on short term assignments -usually not more than three months - get their monthly salary in rupees. Apart from this, they also get a reimbursement for daily expenses and daily allowance, both in the local currency of the country of deputation. So, while reimbursement of daily expenses is at actuals and requires submission of valid bill vouchers, daily allowance does not require submission of such documents. Thus, employees who save daily allowances can convert their savings into rupee once they are back home. This gives them an edge over the employees working within India as the rate of exchange has gone up in terms of the Indian rupee. The rupee has weakened by more than 20 percent against the dollar since the beginning of the current fiscal and also against other currencies, including the UAE dirham by 21 percent and Singapore dollar by 12 percent. "The weakness in the rupee offers some help at a time when budgets are constrained and salary hikes are not expected to come easily," said a software programmer who works at the Mumbai development centre of an IT company that features among the top- 10 Indian IT exporters. As reported by Economic Times, the amount of forex remuneration varies from company to company and there is no particular industry format for this. Also, not all companies provide higher allowances. "For us, it won't make much difference as incidental expenses are at actuals and the amount of daily allowances is very little," said Puneet Jetli, senior VP at MindTree, who also heads the company's people function.

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