Indian IT industry pained by fee hike
The Indian IT industry is still coming to terms with the Visa fee Hike recently passed by the US Congress. Arguments are being put forth that this was bad step for both the Indian as well as American economies.
America is victim to a move that will punish companies that have been at the heart of innovation while keeping it affordable for the country. It is going to make these companies pay a price for living by the spirit of the work programme rolled out to bring in a talented foreign worker to help innovate and create new products and technologies. Indian industry is pained to observe that HR 6080 would impose exponentially cialis buy cialis online higher fees on a small group of firms seeking what is cialis temporary visas for highly skilled workers. This move clearly and specifically dilutes America’s position of taking a high stand on non-discrimination and equal opportunity for all. By targeting select technology services firms operating legally in the US, the proposed fee increases would impose an unfair non-tariff trade barrier and hurt both US and Indian interests
The companies, including the ones mentioned by the Senator, are not just “hiring bright foreign students educated in American universities” but also talented workers from India using these work permits and keeping them at the cutting edge of both product and services in the information technology space. Incidentally, US regulation has been self limiting. Unlike all other countries, including India, US does not have a specific employment visa and H-1 visa has been used in the last two decade to fill the gap. Nasscom has been requesting the US government to introduce a ‘Services Visa’ which would enable movement of people for short-term employment that is not linked to immigration. Employment visas have been used by a large number of US citizens to come to India to further their business interest. Moreover, Indian companies are legitimate users of the H-1 B visa programme. As per the H-1 B visa guidelines, a minimum salary is stipulated by the US, which all companies need to follow. There are additional conditions of not displacing local workers and making all efforts to hire locally before petitioning an H-1 B employee.
Source: Economic Times
U.S. Visa Fees Hurt India’s IT firms
The U.S. Senate has passed legislation that requires all companies with employees in the U.S. that have more than half their U.S.-based employees on H1-B or L-1 visas to pay thousands of dollars in new fees for each worker. … Read MORE.
If the bill becomes a law, it would make on-site resources for Indian software exporters much costlier. Brokerage CLSA said on an average it costs about $2,000 to get an H-1B/L visa currently and the bill proposes an additional fee of $2,000-$2,500 per visa as filing and fraud prevention and detection fees. Som Mittal, president of Indian technology industry trade group Nasscom, says Indian companies could be looking at $200 million to $250 million in higher human-resources costs. And industry watchers believe the fee, which will be applicable from October 1 and will continue until 2014, will mainly affect Indian companies.
The buying cialis passage of this bill will likely enthuse those supporting employment protectionism and encourage similar pieces of legislation Analysts say that any further measures of this sort could seriously hamper India’s top IT companies, which get more than half of their revenue from the U.S. Infosys, which has been running a program to recruit about 1,000 people in the U.S. for the past few quarters, said “it is unfortunate that this tax is being levied on a discriminatory basis when there’s a need to open markets to make companies more competitive in the global marketplace.”
Source: Hindustan cialis tabs Times
Bangalore’s IT story
No single industry has so dramatically transformed life in an Indian city in such a short span of time as the IT industry has done in Bangalore in the last two decades. The potential linkages of IT with virtually every aspect of life, has enabled it to play a powerful transformational role….. Read More.
IT has dramatically changed the cityscape of the quiet, leafy retirement home that Bangalore once was. It has created a new and young workforce, which has changed the way people live and work. Bangalore is not only the capital of the Indian IT industry, but one of the four largest technology cluster in the world. Karnataka now accounts for a little over one-third of all Indian exports of software, most of it from Bangalore. Bangalore is now the biggest hub for the IT sector in India, employing about five lakh persons – out of a total Indian workforce of about 22.3 lakh in the IT industry. More than 2,000 IT companies work out of the city. That the city’s good weather was the main reason for this development is the common argument, but one that is surely rather superficial in explaining the spectacular growth of the IT industry in the city over a two-decade period. The bunch of public sector units and defence establishments that were established after Independence like the Hindustan Machine generic soft tabs cialis Tools, Bharat Electronics Ltd, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. and the Indian Telephone Industries laid the basis for Bangalore’s development.
IBM’s departure from India in 1978 released about 1,200 software personnel into the Bangalore job market. The new Computer Policy of 1984 and the Software Policy of the same year for the first time explicitly recognised the existence of an IT industry. Texas Instruments established its first 100 per cent export-oriented subsidiary in Bangalore soon after. The Karnataka Government played its part by establishing the Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation (KEONICS) in 1976, and the Electronics City soon after. KEONICS played an important role by providing support in terms of marketing, manpower training and testing to small private units in the city. The State Government also took the initiative to establish a Software Technology Park, the first of its kind in the country. A mix of policy measures especially the liberalisation created an environment in which daily cialis dose a vibrant cluster of IT companies could emerge in Bangalore.
Source: The Hindu
Indirect Protectionism?
The US Senate has just voted to put the burden of funding a US-Mexico border security programme on Indian IT companies by steeply hiking the fees paid for H1 and L1 visas that IT companies use to bring employees to the US to work on projects…. Read More.
“A lot of Indian IT companies have a great dependence on H1B and this will make the playing field uneven,” said Mr Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO and Managing Director of MindTree. “There is no co-relation between the two. It is clearly a non-tariff barrier,” pointed Infosys’ Human Resource Chief, Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai. “We would like to reiterate that Indian companies only take a fraction (under 12 per cent) of the total H-1B visas, and the US companies, which also use these visas in large numbers, will remain unaffected by this Bill — thus unfairly reducing the competitiveness of Indian firms,” Nasscom said.
India uses approximately 50,000 H1 and L1 visas a year. “The hike is an indirect form of protectionism. The strong reaction from the industry is understandable considering that the US accounts for 62 per cent of India’s IT services export revenue. The Border Security Bill, whose main objective prescription cialis is to beef up US-Mexico border security with more agents and more unmanned aerial vehicles, will have to now be passed by the US House of Representatives.
Source: The free cialis coupon Hindu BusinessLine
A collective effort from IT Industry Desk to reduce AttritioEconomi
Even as the $50-billion IT online cialis industry may be fighting a fierce war for talent as it tries to claw back to a double-digit growth rate this year, twenty eight residents of Hinjewadi, including top names like Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and Wipro, that once ruthlessly poached talent from each other, have now agreed to work collectively to reduce attrition.
At their first meeting hosted at the Infosys campus in Hinjewadi last month, CXO-level representatives from all 28 companies keenly explored a no-poach agreement, but concluded it was unviable. All of this will be spelt out in a ‘code of ethics’ that will be honoured by the HR departments of all these companies and by their employees. These 28 companies account for 1,00,000 of the 2,50,000 IT professionals employed in Pune. By the same yardstick, they could contribute at least Rs 19,000 crore of the Rs 48,000 crore worth of software exported from Pune last year, though exact figures are not available. These companies have been crippled by 17% attrition leading to an estimated loss of about 5% of total revenues about Rs 850 crore every year.
Hinjewadi may account for only 6-8% of the sector’s total revenues, but if this peace experiment succeeds, it might find more takers across other IT hubs in the country. The industry, which saw a net addition of only 20,000 people last year, is likely to add some 90,000 to the base of 2.3 million employees, according to industry body Nasscom. Already, Infosys has reported an attrition of 16% during the past quarter, the highest in 12 months. Nearly 8,000 employees exited during the quarter, a clear sign of the simmering war for talent.
IT companies in India could be losing close to $2 billion annually to attrition, including loss of productivity and expenditure to find replacement owing to price pressure from customers and also, from the competition. If this attrition is not arrested now, profitability is bound to decrease. Loss of an employee is loss of knowledge. Finding a replacement and getting him to be productive takes 2-6 six months, which makes it a loss of productivity, too .Where a broad agenda could be worked on and implemented, the welcome move should also see strong acomplia dosage adherence from all quarters and participants.
In some ways, these companies are only trying to fix a problem they had created. Hard-pressed for talent, the IT industry resorted to rampant poaching during the heydays of 2007-08. This time around, as the industry looks to get back to growth, they are trying not to make the same mistakes again.
Source:[Economic times]
An Information Technology Research Academy
Secretary in the Union ministry of communications and information technology, R acomplia cheap no prescription Chandrashekhar on Friday said the Government of India (GoI) will set up an Information Technology Research Academy (ITRA) which will act as an umbrella organisation for all the research institutions in the country.
“The Union government is keen on attracting talent for various research projects, which will contribute to the country’s industrial growth,” he told, on the sidelines of an international symposium on the Synthesis and Characterisation of glass/glass-ceramics’. cialis 8 cpr riv0mg The academy will come up in Delhi on the premises of Media Lad Asia, an organisation promoted by the department of information and technology. “The ITRA will have an investment of Rs 150 crore. Of this, Rs 50 crore will be used for infrastructure development, while the remaining will be used for facilities, administration, research projects among others,” he said.”
At present, the three IITs in Bombay, Kharagpur and Delhi as well as the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) will contribute to the setting up and development of the ITRA. “The country’s aim behind promoting research is to have pro-industry research, which will encourage the economy…. Without research, the country’s industry cannot grow…” he cautioned.
Source: [Times of India India Times]
Europe Crisis may cause IT crisis in India
Research firm Forrester said in a report last week that Europe’s volatile economic situation and uncertainty about corporate IT budgets would result in possible delays or cancellations of some outsourcing projects.
India’s leading information technology exporters should report robust quarterly sales, thanks to improving demand from their mainstay financial clients, but Europe’s debt crisis and rising salaries could be a spoiler. “There has been cialis daily 5mg no major impact on volume growth due to the crisis,” comprar reductil online said Harit Shah, an analyst with brokerage Karvy Stock Broking. “It could have an impact going forward, especially due to the euro. We will have to watch for what the management has to say.” Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd face uncertainty on orders from Europe – the second-biggest market for the sector after the United States.
The Indian rupee’s 3.3 per cent weakness against the US dollar in April-June should partially counter the impact of salary hikes and euro volatility for Indian software exporters. Jayesh Shroff, fund manager at SBI Mutual Fund said, “America is still improving, Europe is in trouble. But the demand from corporates has improved.”
Source: [Ibnlive.in]
ITES compliments IT
“For a customer, the outcome is not IT or BPO, but better business. That’s when a combined services offering made sense. “says Mr. Ashutosh Vaidya, head of Wipro BPO, the country’s fifth-largest BPO.
IT and ITES have been two business areas which have best price for cialis brought rich dividends to the Indian economy the past ten years. However, they grew as two separate entities, one considered superior to the other but both considered desirable in their own way. For IT companies, the period of slowdown after the credit crisis of 2008 has been the catalyst for a renewed sense of purpose in the ITeS business. It was then that clients took a hard look at their costs and responded in two ways. One, they looked for business solutions that cut costs. Two, they reduced their number of IT vendors. Both these developments pushed IT companies to embrace the ITES segment of business wholeheartedly. In the opinion of Ganesh Natarajan, vice-chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies, and head of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) committee on IT and ITeS, “In the next five years, the top 15-20 players will have fully integrated IT, BPO and consulting. acomplia weight loss Any credible player will have to have this triangle.”
IT companies are finding that they can use software solutions to improve the speed or quality of ITES transactions. So, they are showing their clients the linkages between IT and ITeS, and pitching for both accounts. Mr Vaidya of Wipro likens it to winning in Formula One, which is about both the car and the driver. “In our case, IT is like the car, ITeS is like the driver. They need to be in synergy to solve customer problems.”
Mr Vaidya illustrates this synergy with the work Wipro is doing for Australian company Origin Energy, which supplies gas and electricity to 3 million customers in the country. The IT team at Wipro is working on a billing system that sends a combined gas and electricity bill to Origin’s customers, while the ITeS team handles customer servicing. Origin has to deal with only one vendor and it pays less than what it would pay to separate vendors. Wipro gets more business.
Source: [Economic Times India Times]