But there is another, more worrisome, dynamic. Although COVID-19 has made the U.S. all too aware of its dependence on China for many essential manufactured goods, our reliance on India for information technology (IT) and other high-tech services gets far less attention. This growing digital dependency takes five main forms:
- America is the largest market for Indian IT services suppliers such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant and others, which collectively enjoyed some $50 billion in sales to the U.S. in 2020.
- American IT services companies such as Accenture, IBM, Deloitte and DXC do much of their actual work in India. These four firms alone employ some 400,000 people in India.
- More than 1,000 U.S. companies have set up their own operations in India, employing some 1 million people for everything from back-office IT and call centers to strategic innovation and research and development.
- There are more than 400,000 non-U.S. residents working in the United States through the H-1B visa program. Roughly three-quarters are from India, and they are overwhelmingly in IT.
- Americans of Indian heritage have a large and high-profile presence in Silicon Valley, as do Indian students and professors at America’s elite universities, especially in STEM fields.
