Over the next 11 months, about 80,000 Indians will wing their way to the US, carrying the hopes and aspirations of their families - and visas stamped H-1B. Assuming that all of them land average jobs, at about $50,000 a year, they will together earn $4 billion.

This will be just one year's crop. There will be about 300,000 Indians in the US on H-1B visas next year, and that would put their minimum earnings at $15 billion. This is the exodus on the back of which the Indian software boom - and the growing reputation of India as a hot-house of software talent - is being built.

Last year, the software industry brought home over $4 billion in foreign exchange, much of it through 'body shopping' - essentially, delivering manpower to US companies and taking a massive cut out of what the foreign employers are willing to pay. 

Estimates of how much body shopping contributes to India's software exports vary - 60-70% according to a study by Jayati Ghosh & C.P. Chandrasekhar of the J N U, and 30% according to industry bigwigs - but one thing is clear. Whatever individual companies may say, body shopping still forms a large part of software exports. That is why it is important to look beneath the surface of what seems to be a well-oiled and unprecedented transfer of manpower from India to the US.

And to listen to the men and women who form the characters in this modern-day epic. You have heard the stories about the typical Indian software engineer who landed in the Silicon Valley with an H-1B visa and $100 in his pocket, and went on to create a multi-million dollar empire. They aren't untrue. 

But also true are the horror stories - about middlemen who treat the Indian job seekers like cattle, of promises that are not kept, of padded resumes, and of dashed dreams - even though they do not make it to the front pages of economic dailies too often. The H-1B visa scam can seriously sully India's image abroad and throw a spoke in the wheel of the country's mighty software exports industry. 

"The adverse impact due to low-quality professionals going to the US will manifest in the next two or three years," says Prashanth Prakash, CEO of the Bangalore-based Netkraft, which claims to be a provider of eBusiness services and expects to earn revenues of $6-7 million this year. 

Already, the American media has started focusing on the shenanigans that go under the name of H-1B. On page 28, we carry an article that will be published by San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's leading newspaper, on what happens to the people who do land up in the US through this route. Read on.

If you are hunting for an easy way to get an H-1B visa, the best place to start would be the crowded Ameerpet Chaurasta in cybercity Hyderabad.

Here, most buildings sport a dozen or more signplates - of recruitment companies which claim they are hiring people for companies abroad, of visa 'consultants' who promise to manage everything concerned with the H-1B visa process, and of computer training institutes that promise to train you as well as find a job for you in the US.

Two years ago, it was an advertisement by an institute that caught the eye of Loknath Reddy, a well-built accountant working with ITC Bhadrachalam. The newspaper ad was placed by the California-based Unifor Information Technologies in late 1998. 'Unifor Inc. invites you to pocket +40k greenbacks', it said, adding that successful candidates 'will be given a job orientation at Unifor India (a sister concern), to be followed by overseas relocation at Unifor Inc., USA'.
      
Reddy jumped at the offer because his friends, with no prior experience, had landed jobs in the US after answering similar ads. He willingly shelled out Rs 1.5 lakh for training in SAP (an enterprise resource planning software) and visa processing. By early 1999 though, Reddy realised that the promised trip might never come through. Says Reddy: "We knew that Unifor had no plans to give us the visas or the jobs." Later that year, Unifor India filed a winding-up petition, and its NRI promoter, Epparla Ramana, returned to the US. Reddy has now reconciled himself to the fact that he will never get his money back. His only consolation: his was not an isolated case.

These days, many of these consultants have become more cautious about the exact nature of services they advertise - because of a spate of well-publicised visa scandals that have rocked Hyderabad in the recent past. But talk to them and, after a few preliminaries, they will openly offer you a one-way ticket and a valid visa to the US even if you don't meet the eligibility criteria. And while Reddy was unlucky, others have managed to procure valid H-1B visas with the help of these consultants or have got their money back as was the case with Shilpa Software.

The Chennai-based US Consulate, which processed 30,000 H-1B visas last year, admits that 15% of the applications it screens is either fraud or suspect. Last year, a survey of 3,487 H-1B visas by the US Department of Labor found that 41% of those was suspect. After meeting dozens of consultants, job seekers and training institutes over several months, Businessworld estimates that 20-30% of the 50,000 H-1B visas given last year could have been obtained through fraudulent means.

It takes a little time - and a dozen-odd meetings with different consultants - before you begin to understand that the H-1B story is not about a scam with one particular modus operandi. Rather, it is about different scams, of varying degrees of complexity, perpetuated by layers of middlemen.

The scam Reddy got trapped in is the simplest. It is operated by fly-by-night fraudsters. They advertise heavily about jobs in the US, charge hefty fees from the recruits, and then decamp with the money.

Last year, Dinesh Gandhi defrauded at least 16 people in Hyderabad of nearly Rs 12.5 lakh using these tactics. Gandhi claimed that he was a recruiter for the US-based Novora Computer Services. Says B. Jaikishen Sony, who paid Rs 1 lakh to Gandhi: "Each time we met Gandhi, he gave us a new deadline for delivering the visas." The incident forced Novora to issue an ad in March 1999 stating that 'the company does not currently have, and never has had in the past, any authorised representative in India to accept employment applications or money for the same'. 

In a way, these frauds are no different from scams promising people jobs in the Gulf countries that used to be so common in the 80s. However, there are more complex, and better organised, H-1B scams which represent the real danger for the Indian software industry's image. These involve recruiters, consultants, lawyers and middlemen actually capable of procuring valid H-1B visas with the help of privately-owned shell companies and elaborate, forged paperwork.

If you are ready to pay the price, you can land up in the US, even though there will be nothing waiting at that end - no job, no support system. Bharat Kumar (name changed), a Delhi-based electronics engineer, recently got an offer from one such firm. It offered to procure an H-1B visa for him through a US-based firm owned by an associate. Obviously, there would be no job awaiting Bharat in the US. But once he landed one, he would need to pay 10% of his salary for the next four years to the firm. The consultant would keep his passport, once he was in the US, to ensure that he would pay up. 

Then there is the next level of body shopping firms in India which get you a visa and sometimes a job as well, by using firms set up by them in the US. The Indian partner lures the visa-hopefuls while the US outfit takes care of the formalities. Once the job seekers reach the US, the American firm places them on a project basis with different software companies - earning huge profits by paying their workers much less than the negotiated project rates. ...Continued