What Is Trump's Card For Indian IT Companies?

What is at stake is the future of the IT sector which over the last 25 years has grown from a cottage industry to a behemoth that employees over 1.1 million highly skilled workforce.

- Vijay Satokar

The Trump Towers stand tall and distinctly different than other buildings in Pune, India’s number two Silicon Valley. Trump did not develop the property-he lent his name to the towers. Not exactly a tourist attraction in the modern city, the towers may become one, depending on the US President’s action do to the country’s IT industry that the city plays host to after Bengaluru.

As it stands the Trump towers, the only project by companies owned by the Donald Trump to have taken shape in India, cast a worrying shadow on the thriving IT industry in the country. Known as the education hub, cultural capital of the Maharashtra state, Pune also is known as second Silicon valley- after Bengaluru.

The Indian IT industry is putting up a brave face and although unlike his strong views on construction of a wall on border with Mexico, the US President is showing signs being soft or not that tough on the H-1B visas issue, concerns remain on what course actions of the US President will take.

What is at stake is the future of the IT sector which over the last 25 years has grown from a cottage industry to a behemoth that employees over 1.1 million highly skilled workforce. India’s InfoTech industries’ revenues have soared to $150 billion of which the largest chunk comes from software services. India controls over 55 per cent of world’s outsourcing industry and there are already 3.5 lakh Indian software engineers and workers in the US.