Modi’s U.S. Visit Should Explore Scope Beyond H1-B Visa, Says NASSCOM Chief

There should be more emphasis on the technology partnership between India and the U.S. during Prime Minister Modi’s visit rather than limiting the engagement to only H-1B visas, NASSCOM President R Chandrashekhar told BloombergQuint.

He stressed that the economic relationship between the two countries is symbiotic in nature and Indian I.T. industry has played a significant role in improving the competitiveness of corporate America.

Chandrashekhar urged both countries to focus on cooperation in the technology space and insisted that jobs creation in the I.T. industry across both the parties is synergistic and not a zero-sum game.

“The synergy between the two is critical and now increasingly the engines of innovation in both countries, being in a sense, joined at the hip by the Indian diaspora and the kind of innovation which the Indian startups are also bringing into the service, I believe (that is) what has to be focused and will be focused by both the leaders, in which the visa issue is but a small part and hardly the be all and end all of that,” he said.

Following Trump’s election to presidency, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency made it harder for companies to bring overseas technology workers to the U.S. using the H-1B work visa. The government also laid out new measures to combat what it called “fraud and abuse” in the program. Employers were also warned by the Justice department to not discriminate against local workers.

H-1B visa program allowed companies to recruit 85,000 employees in the U.S. from abroad each year for specialty positions in various sectors including technology. Last year, the allotted number was exhausted with in a week. Outsourcing companies including India’s Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Infosys were among the biggest beneficiaries of the visa program.

Watch the entire discussion on H-1B visas with R Chandrashekhar here:

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