Indian companies, which are becoming major players in the international arena, are hiring aggressively in the United States, reversing the earlier trend when they transferred Indians to work in America on temporary visas.

Terming it reverse “offshoring”, a new report names India’s largest offshoring firm Tata Consultancy Service Ltd (TCS) and software giants Infosys and Wipro among these players. The report says some American workers laid off are now re-employed in Indian outfits after training in India. Wipro Ltd is scouting US locations for two big software writing centres that eventually could employ hundreds of programmers each. Cities on its short list include Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, because of their deep tech- talent pools and reasonable salary costs, the business magazine says.

“The work we’re doing requires more and more knowledge of the customers’ businesses, and you want local people to do that,” Wipro chairman Azim H Premji is quoted by Businessweek as saying.

As of now, only 2.5 per cent of Wipro’s global workforce is non-Indian, but the company wants to boost that to more than 10 per cent in a few years.

Easing tensions
The Indian outsourcers acknowledge the trend might ease tensions as the Senate mulls regulations that would require companies applying for H-1B visas — temporary working papers for foreigners — to try hiring Americans first.

“If we can hire close to our clients, we don’t have to bring in somebody from India on an H-1B,” S Padmanabhan, human resources chief for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) said.   Surprisingly, BusinessWeek says, it often costs more to ship in Indians on a temporary basis than it does to hire Americans. Base salaries are comparable, because Indian companies must by law pay market rates for people they bring in on work visas.

Also, as the Indian rupee has risen more than 10 per  cent against the dollar this year, hiring Americans has gotten cheaper. At the same time, fierce competition for tech talent in India is pushing salaries there up by 12 per cent to 15 per cent per year, although they remain less than a third of those in the US.

The Indians, says BusinessWeek, are recruiting a combination of fresh college grads and experienced veterans who have worked in American companies.

They’re especially active at campus job fairs. “I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity, especially because they send you abroad for training,” Brian Oswald, a 23-year-old Rutgers University graduate with a 2006 degree in industrial engineering who joined TCS in February, was quoted as saying.