A sudden spike in U.S. costs for new H-1B petitions, set at $100,000, excluding renewals and existing holders, has jolted India’s tech economy into a moment of clarity. With over 70% of H-1B visas held by Indians, the policy targets the single largest pipeline feeding India’s on-site tech model. And as Zippee Founder and CEO, Madhav Kasturia argues, the bigger story isn’t visas, it’s India’s job quality gap.
Image Credits: Madhav Kasturiya, Linkedin
For decades, H-1B functioned as India’s on-site bridge: send engineers to U.S. clients, bill premium rates, keep relationships sticky while families chased green cards.
That bridge now faces a six-figure toll at the entry gate. The direct hit lands on an IT industry Kasturia pegs at $280 billion, with over half its revenue tied to America.
The immediate consequence is predictable: returnees. On paper, it looks like “reverse brain drain.” In practice, it raises a tougher question, where do these globally seasoned professionals land?
India already graduates ~1.5 million engineers a year, many underemployed. An influx of returnees with product exposure, client-facing chops, and higher expectations can sharpen, not ease, the mismatch between talent and meaningful work.
“H-1B was never the problem. India’s lack of high-quality jobs was,” says Kasturia. “If we don’t build those jobs now, talent won’t stay.”
The model that’s cracking
H-1B wasn’t merely a visa; it underwrote a business architecture. On-site anchors won trust and accountability. Premium billing followed proximity and ownership. India’s services giants and mid-tier firms built scale around that rhythm. With a steep price on new entries, the rhythm falters. The risk isn’t just fewer visas. it’s fewer pathways for Indian firms to command high-value work directly at the customer interface.
The real bottleneck: quality of work
Kasturia’s warning strips away polite euphemisms. India’s constraint is not the number of engineers; it’s the density of complex, end-to-end work that stretches capability and justifies compensation. Without roles that offer architectural ownership, platform mandates, and product decision rights, the best people will keep moving, to other countries, or to remote ecosystems that offer harder problems and clearer upside.
What a credible response looks like now
Government:
Open more complex build opportunities at home, in digital public infrastructure, cybersecurity, energy tech, health tech, where Indian teams own core systems, not just implementation. Reduce friction with faster approvals for pilots, structured data sandboxes with guardrails, and predictable treatment for equity so returnees see a path to wealth creation, not only salaries.
Industry:
Rewrite job design toward product and platform ownership. Put engineers closer to customers and outcomes, security, SRE, compliance, and road-mapping included. Create landing tracks tailored to returnees’ international experience, tech strategy, platform stewardship, “customer zero” programs, not just headcount slots.
Startups:
Chase hard problems early: infra software, deep tech, vertical SaaS in regulated domains. Treat equity as the new visa, align senior returnees on mission and ownership, not billable hours.
If India uses this moment to deepen its bench of high-quality jobs, a returnee wave could be catalytic: experience flows back, standards rise, and product ambition compounds. If it doesn’t, the market will route around constraints, as it always does. Talent will exit again, just to a different destination.
Kasturia’s post lifts the mask on a longstanding fiction: visas were a workaround, not a strategy. The strategy is jobs better ones, at scale.
Stress Test At Home: Zippee Founder
The H-1B shock isn’t merely a policy twist abroad; it is a stress test at home. Whether India passes depends on what we build in the next cycle: roles with real ownership, problems worth solving, and a runway long enough to keep the best here by choice.
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