May 23: Worried over the issue of rising wages at home, India’s outsourcing giants are looking for the growth opportunities in the United States. According to a media report, many of the Indian companies have started hiring workers in the North America. With Washington crimping visas for the visiting Indian workers, some companies such as Mumbai-based Aegis Communications are slowly hiring workers locally as their largest corporate customers are based in North America, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The report said that many of them are call centre workers and many are African Americans without any college degrees. Some even lack high school diplomas. It noted that — In this evolution, outsourcing has come home. Aegis, a subsidiary of India’s Essar Group, an energy, telecom and metals conglomerate, is quoted as saying it’s pioneering the next generation of outsourcing — putting the work closer to its global customers. Its executives call the practice near-sourcing, diverse shoring and sometimes, cross-shoring.
Companies such as TCS, Genpact and Infosys are the largest users of the H-1B visa programme and have collectively brought as many as 30,000 workers into the country in a year on H-1B or other visas. But the companies that use the visa programmes have faced opposition from the US labour unions as well as the age-discrimination lawsuits from the American tech workers alleging that they were passed over by the hiring practices, the Post noted.
At the same time, when the unemployment rates are high and the economic recovery lags, India-based companies have seized an opportunity to improve their image and expand their US businesses by taking over companies and hiring more US talent, it said. TCS, for example, is ramping up its North American presence in major deals with Citibank, Dow Chemical and Hilton Worldwide.It plans to hire more than 1,000 Americans in 2011 and to base 10,000 of its 1,85,000 global employees in the country.
The Post quoted Mr Robert Webb, chief information officer at Hilton Worldwide, as predicting that the India-based firms will evolve to be more like one of the traditional consulting firms in the US by taking on the higher-end capabilities such as business planning, industry knowledge and change management.