German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on February 17 that his government wants to make it easier for information technology experts from India to obtain work visas in Germany as the country struggles with a shortage of skilled labour.

On his official visit to India from February 25-26, Scholz said the German government wants to make it easy for Indian techies to obtain work visas in Germany, Bloomberg reported.

“We want to make the issuing of visas easier,” he told reporters during a visit to India's high-tech hub of Bengaluru.

The chancellor said that Germany needs skilled workers to meet the demand for software development in the country, and assured to modernise the bureaucratic process and legal requirements to make it easier for workers and their families to come to Germany. He offered no specifics on how many workers Germany hopes to attract from India.

He said that Germany was already in the process of relaxing language requirements to make the German-speaking country a more attractive destination for IT professionals, who have traditionally veered towards English-speaking nations.

"It is clear that anyone who comes to Germany as an IT specialist can first easily converse with all his or her colleagues in English because many in Germany can speak English," Scholz said, adding that German could be learned later, DW reported.

"A lot of reform proposals have already been collected and we are continuing to work on them," Scholz said.

In the last leg of his visit, Scholz visited several IT firms in Bengaluru and praised India's "booming" software development sector.

The German chancellor on Sunday visited IT companies in Bengaluru along with a site operated by the German software company SAP.

Mr. Scholz was speaking on the second day of his trip to India, after meeting Saturday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss the fallout from the war in Ukraine.

The German leader last year invited Mr. Modi to attend a summit of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations he hosted in Bavaria, and said he favors India joining this year's meeting in Japan, too.

Image source: Reuters