RIDDS

Trump wants fewer Indian technology professionals moving to America. The unintended consequence may be more American technology work moving to India. I have spent more than three decades in this industry. So when I read about the latest US action restricting some large technology companies from using PERM, the route through which employees move towards permanent residency, I was less worried than the headlines suggested. One number explains why. Indian IT companies accounted for less than 1,400 of the 117,849 PERM certifications last year. Less than 2%. The direct impact may therefore be smaller than it first appears. But something more interesting is happening underneath. The original Indian IT model was simple. The customer had important work in America, so we sent Indian engineers there to do it. Then we discovered that much of that work could be done from India. The onsite-offshore model was born. I lived that transition. We may be at the beginning of another one. America is making it harder to move Indian talent there, while technology is making it easier for smaller teams in India to take responsibility for increasingly sophisticated work. There is an irony here. In trying to reduce the movement of Indian talent to America, the US may accelerate the movement of American work to India. But I don’t mean another wave of coding and maintenance jobs. The opportunity is architecture, product engineering, cybersecurity, AI implementation, industry solutions and eventually ownership of products and IP. Indian teams should not merely receive specifications from New York. They should help decide what gets built. Not merely maintain a global bank’s technology platform, but help redesign the bank. Not just supply engineers to solve somebody else’s problem, but own the problem. There is an uncomfortable truth too. For thirty years, growth in Indian IT and growth in Indian IT employment travelled together. Win more business, hire more engineers. As AI technology improves productivity, that relationship may weaken. Indian IT could win more sophisticated work and create more value without headcount growing at the same rate. So we need a different definition of success. For thirty years, Indian IT competed largely on the cost of Indian talent. The next thirty will depend on the capability of Indian talent. Can we create architects rather than only programmers? Build products and IP here? Move more global decision-making to India? Create more value per person and therefore pay our people far better? Those are much bigger questions than how many visas America issues. So worry not about the visa headlines. Trump may make it harder for Indian engineers to move to American work. The opportunity is to make American work move to Indian engineers.