Vineet Nayar said the visa headlines are not worrying him.

Former CEO of HCL Technologies Vineet Nayar brushed aside the panic triggered by the Trump administration’s suspension of the Green Card process and said Indian IT companies account for less than 2% of Green Card filings. The direct impact is smaller than it appears. He predicted that it will be America’s loss because American companies will now move to India. “Trump may make it harder for Indian engineers to move to American work. The opportunity is to make American work move to Indian engineers,” Nayar said.“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,” he said.“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,” he explained.

Work in America to onsite-offshore model

Nayar said he saw the transition from the time when it was absolutely necessary to send Indian engineers to America for work to a time when it was found that the work could be done from India. The onsite-offshore model was born. This might be the moment of another transition, he said. “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,” he said.“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,” he predicted.“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,” he said.HCL Technologies is one of the eight companies that got their PERM process suspended.Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu too expressed optimism in the announcement and urged Indians to leave America and instead build India.