Migration of Indian techies to London is climbing. A London-based IT association has claimed that Indian IT workers are flooding the UK on temporary permits, undercutting local wages and raising prospects of a homegrown skills shortage.
"Wages are being undercut by companies bringing over Indian workers, who are put up in hostels and paid poorly," Ann Swain, Chief Executive of the Association for Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCo) told the Daily Telegraph . According to her, salaries for certain IT workers have fallen in recent months, thanks to the deluge of low-cost Indian tech pros.
Home Office immigration figures show that 21,448 foreign IT workers have been issued work permits this year, an increase of 15 per cent on 2004 and almost double the level five years ago. Of those, 85 per cent now come from India.
Deloitte Consultancy has predicted that 2 million jobs currently based in Western economies will migrate to India by 2008. According to industry sources, most consulting companies offer some form of "onshore offshoring."
IBM, LogicaCMG, Accenture and CapGemini all transfer Indian workers to the UK for projects, as do Indian consulting firms Tata Consulting Services and Infosys. One of the real reasons why companies are turning to people from the Indian subcontinent is that UK graduates cannot compete with the quality of India's technology graduates. "The level of intelligence and attention to detail is lacking in UK staff coming through the education system," an IT expert said.
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