For IT engineers, the periodical one- or two-year stints in the US or Europe used to be the primary attraction of their jobs. They not only got to live in places that most Indians aspire to but, during those stints, they also received salaries substantially higher than in India and which allowed them to make significant savings. For business development professionals in IT, foreign travel used to be for shorter stints, but more frequent. 

But that opportunity for travel is now fast diminishing for economic, business, diplomatic, strategic and technological reasons. 

Foreign customers are asking IT vendors to maintain only a minimal staff onsite, given that they have to pay more for such staff, something they would like to avoid in the current dull economy. Visa and immigration rules have become extremely stringent, leading to a large number of visa rejections - 50% in L1 visa applications, 10% in H1 applications and 30% in the B1 category.

Indian IT providers are enlarging their local talent pools in customer markets in order to overcome the visa challenge, as also the political pressure in Western markets to hire locally. Some have even started hiring freshers from American and European university campuses. Such hiring means they need fewer Indians to travel to customer locations as per a report in TOI by Mini Joseph Tejaswi.

And finally, technologies like cloud computing, mobility, remote infrastructure management and Web collaboration solutions have made the aspect of physical presence in client locations less necessary.

SD Shibulal, CEO of Infosys Technologies, says, "Clients do have a say on the size of onsite staffing and also we are hiring in customer markets. So it's possible that travel from India has reduced." 

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