H1B visa: Infosys Cofounder Narayana Murthy comments, Trump not signing order

Feb 3: Folks in Indian IT companies have been a troubled lot of late, thanks to the new H1B Visa bill. However, there’s someone who believes that the executive order on H1B Visa won’t come into effect.

Head of the Republican Hindu Coalition, Chicago-based Shalabh Kumar, has said something paradoxical to media reports, claiming that no such H1B visa order is being drafted by Trump’s government. He has even added that no reforms are being planned right now for H-1B.

But he opined that IT would have a key role to play in growth of US economy as there is a shortage of skilled IT employees in the country. Shalabh feels that America would soon see a huge demand for employees in the IT sector and that need can only be satisfied by IT workers from India.

He adds that there will actually be an increased demand for H1B visas, as the number of persons on these visas from India is going to rise further.

Shalabh points out that that the Trump administration wouldn’t cause problems for people trying for the H1B visa and that it would actually work on avoiding scam and exploitation of these visas.

Meanwhile, Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy has urged Indian IT firms to stop sending employees on H1B visa jobs to America and instead focus on hiring locally in the US.

Murthy said becoming multi-cultural is a "very, very hard option".

"They (Indian software companies) must recruit American residents in the US, Canadians in Canada, British people in Britain etc. That's the only way, we can become a true multi-national company and in order to do that, we should stop using H1-B visas and sending a large number of Indians to those countries to deliver services," he added.

"I think even if the executive order comes, we should look at it more as opportunity for Indian companies to become more multi-cultural than we have been, rather than looking at it as a lacuna." (PTI)