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Infosys plans to hire 10,000 US workers over next 2 years

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SAN FRANCISCO/MUMBAI: IT services firm Infosys Ltd plans to hire 10,000 US workers in the next two years and open four technology centres in the United States, starting with a centre this August in Indiana, the home state of US Vice President Mike Pence.


The move comes as Infosys and some of its Indian peers such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd have become political targets in the United States and have been accused of displacing US workers’ jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas to service US clients.


The IT service firms — which advise large companies on tech issues and carry out a range of tasks for them, from managing back-end computing systems to high-level programming —rely heavily on the H1-B visa programme, which US President Donald Trump told federal agencies to review.


Other Indian outsourcing firms have recruited in the United States, but Infosys is the first to give concrete hiring numbers and a timeline for its plans, following Trump’s visa review.


The move marks a huge increase in US hiring by Infosys. In 2014, when Vishal Sikka became chief executive, the firm had said it would hire 2,000 people in the United States.


In a telephone interview with Reuters from Indiana, Sikka said Infosys had achieved that goal and now wanted to hire US workers in fields such as artificial intelligence, cloud and big data.


“The reality is bringing in local talent and mixing that with the best of global talent in the times we are living in and the times we’re entering is the right thing to do,” said Sikka.


He said the timing of the decision was not related to the visa review. The company started active talks with Indiana in late February, Deputy Chief Operating Officer Ravi Kumar told reporters in Indiana.


“More and more as we look at the future, we have to decrease the dependency on visas,” Sikka told CNBC earlier on Tuesday. “That is something we have been working on for the last two and a half years.”


The 10,000 new US jobs will form a small part of Infosys’ overall workforce of over 200,000.


Infosys did not give details on specific jobs it would bring to the United States, but said it would seek experienced tech professionals and recent graduates from universities and community colleges.


Kumar said some of the Indiana jobs would likely come from nearby universities such as Notre Dame and Ball State, and would chiefly serve the company’s US manufacturing, pharmaceutical and life sciences clients in the United States.


Infosys did not say where the other three tech centres would be located.


Last month, two industry sources said that Infosys was applying for just under 1,000 H-1B visas this year. One of the sources said that was down from about 6,500 applications in 2016 and some 9,000 in 2015.


Indian IT service firms, which typically flood the lottery system each year with thousands of applications, have been among the largest H1-B recipients annually. — Reuters


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