Singapore block visas for Indian IT professionals:-
When a majority of people are worried about the visa issue in United States of America, Singapore comes into limelight by blocking visa for Indian IT professionals. Various companies like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, L&T Infotech were advised to hire local talent in Singapore. Due to this, these companies are trying to relocate to other countries in the region.
These developments have led the government to put on hold the review of Comprehensive Economic Co-operative Agreement (CECA), a formal trade agreement between India and Singapore due to violation of trade pact. An Indian officer said, “They are doing it despite the CECA clearly stating that there will be no ENT or quotas on agreed services. This is a violation of the agreement.” The president of NASSCOMM, R Chandrashekar, added, “No new visas means the existing ones will not be renewed and that will make it difficult to maintain existing levels of workforce.” It is hard to recruit the locals as they don’t posses such kind of skill or the level of expertise is not met. This has caused a lot of inconvenience for the Indian IT professionals, as they are encountering similar situation in The United States of America and The United Kingdom.
R Chandrashekar added, “UK is another area where active discussions are going on. You have to remember that the US visa problems are nothing new. There have always been critics and efforts to reduce the number of H-1B visa since the last 3-4 years.” The outsourcing of professionals has faced such barriers due to countries prescribing the professionals to fulfill a lot of conditions. It even insists that a local professional be given a preference if he or she possesses a similar skill. The United States grants 65,000 H-1B visas annually to foreign workers and 20,000 to foreign students enrolled in the country’s colleges and universities. People argued that the American companies use it to replace the local workers with foreigners on lower wages. All this has resulted in a severe blow to the Indian IT officials and Indian companies operating in foreign areas.
