Weeks after the US announced steep new fees for H-1B visas, large banners at a Delhi metro station outside the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) proclaimed: "We still sponsor H-1Bs" and "$100K isn’t going to stop us from hiring the best," in a nod to the new fee structure.
The campaign by AI recruiting platform Metaview captured a broader sentiment in India’s elite tech circles — quiet defiance toward Washington’s latest immigration curbs.
That same confidence is evident across the country’s network of prestigious engineering schools, the Indian Institutes of Technology. With annual campus recruitment season set to begin in a few weeks, leading faculty and students at two IITs told Bloomberg News that the country's brightest engineers no longer see US jobs as essential for success. Rising growth prospects at home, they said, are reshaping career ambitions.
"It's possibly an opportunity for some of us," said Rangan Banerjee, the director of IIT-Delhi, referring to both the Trump administration’s visa restrictions and broader trade tensions between India and the US.
President Donald Trump hit India with 50% tariffs in August — the highest in Asia — partly to penalize it for its ties with Russia. Soon after, he imposed a $100,000 fee on new applications under the H-1B visa program, which is widely used by Indian and American tech firms to bring in skilled workers from abroad.
The move, coupled with growing uncertainty over India-US ties, may push some talented Indians to return home, Banerjee said.
For decades, graduates of the IITs — which accept fewer than 2% of those who apply — have flocked to the US to work in lucrative sectors from finance to technology. Many have gone on to become senior executives at some of the world’s biggest companies, including Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai and International Business Machines Corp. Arvind Krishna.
But students are now rethinking that path, Banerjee said. Global giants from Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have built massive global capability centers in India, offering lucrative roles and driving a new wave of growth.
Far from the back-offices of the 1990s, these hubs now handle critical, high-end work — so vital that one European bank concluded a major disruption in India would hit its global activities more than a similar disaster at its headquarters.
At the same time, India’s startup ecosystem has also taken firm root, with several homegrown firms going public. Earlier this week, the parent of the nation’s top online broker Groww — co-founded by IIT graduates — made a stellar market debut.
This domestic momentum has given young engineers and entrepreneurs more confidence to stay and build at home, rather than chase opportunities abroad.
“I think the timing is very right,” said Banerjee. “We want our students to be job creators.”
The shift comes as India is poised to overtake Japan as the world’s fourth largest economy. Services already make up more than half of the country’s output, and global firms are expanding operations in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune to tap its vast engineering talent.
“A reasonable fraction of students are now staying in India,” said Ashok Jhunjhunwala, founder of the IIT-Madras Research Park. “There is a tremendous raw talent in India.”
However, IIT graduates make up only a sliver of India’s overall tech talent. Anxiety runs higher at less prestigious engineering colleges, where many students still see US degrees as their ticket to upward mobility. “The kind of higher education system in the US is unparalleled,” said Vineet Gupta, co-founder of Jamboree Education, a nationwide coaching network that helps Indian students apply to foreign universities.
But even those aspirations are cooling a bit. Applications from Indian students to US colleges have dropped 14% since Trump’s return to the White House, according to a report released Thursday by Common App, a college application platform.
Akshay Sharma, a 19-year-old student at IIT-Delhi, had long planned to go to the US but is now keeping his options open, seeking internships in both countries. “Last year, I would not have thought to do this.”
Thinking long-term
IIT Delhi and IIT Madras are among the oldest and most prestigious of India’s elite engineering schools. The first IIT was established in 1951, and the system has since expanded to 23 colleges across the country. Together, they produce about 25,000 graduates a year — a small fraction of the 1.5 million engineers India churns out annually, according to TeamLease, one of India’s largest staffing companies.
Arpan Tulsyan, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, said IIT graduates are unlikely to see their career trajectories disrupted by Trump’s H-1B visa crackdown.
“The scene in India is changing very fast,” she said. “We are not so dependent on the US visa and we shouldn’t be because their policy is not under our control.”
At IIT Bombay — another top engineering institute — domestic opportunities outnumbered those abroad even before the immigration clampdown. In the 2023–24 academic year, the school reported 1,475 accepted job offers, of which only 78 came from international companies. The institute did not specify whether those firms were hiring for roles in India or overseas.
Students also seemed largely unfazed by Trump’s moves, as early recruitment data show strong hiring momentum, according to a Times of India report.
Read More: US Colleges See Fewer Foreign Applicants as India Fuels Decline
“It is looking less lucrative to go to the US, but there are a lot of other offers from other companies and countries,” said Karthik Ravi Kumar, a student at IIT-Delhi.
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