Will U.S. visas become a dream for Indian Techies?

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 02 November 2010, 14:51 IST   |    26 Comments
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Will U.S. visas become a dream for Indian Techies?
Bangalore: After an increase in H1B visa fees, now the Indian tech companies find it very difficult to get sufficient visa for their employees since the U.S. consulates have now intensified scrutiny of documents and are fishing for more details when processing visas of Indian techies. Majority of them say that new policies make it practically impossible for local IT companies to get U.S. work visas. Soon U.S. work visa for Indian techies may remain as a mere dream. The visa problem is so grave that it became one of the main topics to be extensively discussed at HCL employee-management meeting as well. When an employee pointed out how lack of U.S. visas was crippling its operations abroad. Vineet Nayar, Chief Executive Officer of HCL Technologies agreed to it by saying "U.S. has come down drastically on the number of visas being issued. They are being unreasonable. But we can do nothing about it." Som Mittal, president of National Association of Software Services Companies (Nasscom), agreed that scrutiny by the consulates across India had gone up. He said "In some cases, the rules are not applied uniformly by U.S. consulates in different cities. Also, sometimes information asked for are not relevant to the case. They are asking for more details than before. All these things are hampering free movement of skilled Indian IT professionals and are barriers to the trade." India has realized tremendous benefits from globalization. Similarly, India's economic liberalization has created significant economic opportunities for American businesses and workers. Whereas the U.S. Embassy officials say that the U.S. government remains confident that our long-term economic partnership with India will continue to deepen and provide benefits for all segments of our societies.