A Vote for Expatriate Work Permit : By - Asoke K. Laha President & MD Interra IT

The Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (IACC) with which I am deeply involved for quite some time (as the President of the North Indian Council and presently a member of the central Executive Committee), has said what we have all recognized and refused to comment in public. The Chamber said that India should ease its stringent laws governing the employment of expatriates in India. By import, it means that there is severe shortage of qualified personnel in select sectors and in segments where India’s growth potential is very high.

What are they? Indeed, there is a long wish list that includes experts for training call centre staff, R&D institutions, software developers for critical areas, sport coaches (I do not want to join issue with the Cricket Board of India), teachers, technology leaders… and the list goes on. There seems to be a hidden rider. Such recruitments should be made if sufficient talents are not available in India, probably a caveat that we have learned from the American immigration rules, which are still caught up in the political football in the US. 

First, let us see what are the impediments to recruiting expatriates. My knowledge is that theoretically that is possible, provided one can get a work permit, which is being issued by the Home Ministry. There is no blanket sanction for those who are applying. Each application has to be seen on its own merit. Rejections on flimsy grounds, long delays, cumbersome procedures… and the complaints of the applicants are long and terse. It reminds me of what we complain about stringent immigration rules in the US, visa restrictions, work permits, etc. Strangely, such conundrums are happening at a time when India Inc is on an overdrive to acquire corporations abroad. It is happening at a time when there are an increasing number of expatriates being employed in India in various segments ranging from IT to hospitality. It is happening at a time when the Indian labour market, particularly upmarket skill profiles, is getting overheated. It is also happening at a time when our Home Ministry is getting increasingly cagey about the activities of the expatriates operating out from our shore especially from certain countries, even going to the extent that it is becoming an increasing security risk. It is happening at a time when the WTO is keenly debating the movement of the natural persons in a more focussed way than before. It is happening at a time when the recent Business Week has coined a term like phantom GDP in US disproving the much-coveted theory put forward by the corporations that outsourcing leads to gains for the US corporations. The last subject requires more detailed treatment, which I deal separately in another issue.

Are they mere coincidence? I do not think so. Take the case of lawyers, accountants, designers, media outfits, advertising companies, PR firms, etc. There is a strong lobby working for the opening up of these segments in as much as the group opposing such entries. I am not getting into the details of the issues. But I am sure sooner or later, the Government of India will amend the Advocates Act that enables the foreign advocates to practise in India, cornering a pie from our ever-increasing volume and size of legal fees. But that is fine provided there is a level-playing field. Could our advocates or chartered accountants advertise like their counterparts in the West? These are the primary issues that we have to look into before we open our segments to others. Also, we have to invent credible theoretical paradigms to prove that employing expatriates would help the efficiency levels of our corporations like what we espouse to the Americans or Europeans. Once we start doing that, the US Senate cannot block visas to our job workers, cannot put a cap on H1B visas, cannot reject the visa applications from a small- time trader or a student from a tier-II or tier-III city, cannot take a stand against remittance of the social security tax paid by the millions of Indians working on short-term visas etc. Reciprocity will become the key driver to policy prescriptions. As interests become paired, our vision becomes shared. It is not flow limited to one side. It is a two-way affair for common benefit. That is the best business model that works in a micro organization or a macro-paradigms involving nations.

Let us not lose sight of the official sitting on judgment in the Home Ministry. If he could see everything through a jaundiced eye, the fault does not lie with him. He is being trained and instructed to do so. Home Ministry has to see everything from a security angle. I remember what has happened to a friend of mine – Prabhakaran–– a high-ranking official from a business organization. He was a tax expert and wanted to have first-hand information about the General Budget, as and when it was presented. I am referring to a time when direct telecast of such events was not even dreamt of by even the most progressive policy-maker. His request to be in the Speakers Gallery, a coveted honour at that time, was turned down since he shared the name with the LTTE supremo Prabhakaran and hailed from the same place Tamil Nadu. That could be stretching things to the extreme.

And yet, we have to have a way out. Security of the nation should be sovereign right and there should not be any compromise on that. That is true for all the countries. There are situations, where security risk is minimal or nil. Let me take an example. A big corporation in India wants to recruit expatriates for its ongoing operations or joint ventures. Recruitment of such personnel or granting the work permits should be less cumbersome and time-consuming since the onus of recruitment and its responsibility is cast on the corporation.

Let me conclude by narrating a comedy being staged by one vernacular channel. The central theme of the skit was the expatriate employment in a small city. There are people from nationalities engaged in various avocations. You have street vendors, fishermen, tailors, office goers, sex workers, artists, etc. speaking different languages, dialects, etc. Managing all these multi-racial population are Indians mostly returned from Gulf, US and other countries. They are trying to perpetrate the experiences that they had working in other countries, such as discrimination, exploitation, abusive languages and cruel treatments, etc. They take pride in telling that their employee profile includes people from all nationalities. At the end, story unfolds the latent psyche of an average Indian expatriate; his hidden inferiority complex that surfaces when he gives back the same treatment that he has received while he was working in that country, the perverted ambition of a slave to own the custody of the master at one stage, his double standards when he was an employee and an employer and the like. Let our plea to recruit expatriates should not be the one that was demonstrated by the family-owned companies in the seventies and eighties to recruit MBAs from IIMs and other prestigious institutions just to lap up in the cocktail circuits, no matter whether the hired people stayed there or not.