PANJIM: In an interesting comment, which may raise eyebrows, Information Technology Minister Rohan Khaunte on Thursday thanked US President Donald Trump for the crackdown on H-1B visa saying that Goa’s talented professionals who had migrated to America will now return.
Speaking to a group of polytechnic students in Panjim, Khaunte said the State government will soon come out with a proper policy on start-ups for those returning from US.
“Thanks to Donald Trump, we are having issues of H-IB visas. We are having a lot of people who have gone abroad, who want to come back for various reasons,” Khaunte said.
“We need to find industry and security for them. And that is a challenge which we have taken up. I am happy and quite proud to say that in the next ten days, a proper policy on start-ups will be implemented,” he added.
The minister said that bureaucratic red tape was leading to delay in sanctioning of start-ups in Goa.
Indian technology companies are in the cross hairs. Outsourcing providers are contracted by US firms and government agencies to deploy programmers and
engineers. This usually happens at the client’s premises instead of their own offices, that is, “offsite”.
Indian nationals are so dominant in the H1B program that they accounted for 1,95,247, or 70.1 percent, of all beneficiaries in 2015.
Whatever the impact on these outsourcing companies, the crackdown is already hurting the net worth of their billionaire founders as investors anticipate tightened enforcement will hurt earnings, agency reports said. Tata Consultancy has lost about 3 percent since the US administration announced in March it would suspend premium processing of H1B visas, lagging a 2.8 percent advance in the benchmark Sensex index.
