Indian companies don't steal jobs, they create jobs in the US: Ravi Shankar Prasad
Union Minister For Law, Justice And IT Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday said that Indian companies don't steal jobs, they create jobs in the US. Prasad was speaking at the India Today Conclave 2017 in Mumbai.
Answering a question on the restrictions being imposed by Trump administration which is likely to impact the Indian IT sector, the minister said that the Indian IT initiative is an asset for the American economy. He further said that the Indian IT companies have given nearly 20 billion dollars as tax in US in the last 5 years and have created as many as 400,000 jobs for the people there.
Prasad reminded the audience that Indian IT companies were present in over 200 cities of over 80 countries including the USA. Prasad also noted that the sector has given value addition to nearly 75 per cent of the 500 fortune companies.
The IT Minister's statements come in the backdrop of the US government's push for limiting the H1-B visa professionals in the country. Last year in November, then Republican presidential nominee (now US president) Donald Trump had claimed that the Americans were living through the "greatest jobs theft" in the history of the world, saying US companies were moving out jobs to countries like India, China, Mexico and Singapore.
The minister also spoke on India's digital master plan, saying that digital India is going to become a 1 trillion dollar economy in the future.
"We missed the industrial revolution, we missed the entrepreneurial revolution. We do not want to miss the digital revolution. We want to become leaders in that," said the minister.
Here the highlights of the Ravi Shankar Prasad's speech:
The Digital India campaign started back in 2014 when the Prime Minister said "IT+IT=IT" which is "India Talent+ Information Technology=India Tomorrow"
We have added mobile phones in India equal to the population in France and Italy. We are creating a digital ecosystem.
1 lakh 79 kilometres of optical fibres have been laid in India in the past two and a half years.
