An American IT professional, who worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has filed a lawsuit against the company accusing it of practising discrimination against Americans in its US offices and favouring South Asians in hiring and promotion. An IT worker is accusing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of discriminating against American workers and favoring “South Asians” in hiring and promotion. It’s backing up its complaint, in part, with numbers.

India-based Tata achieves its “discriminatory goals” in at least three ways, the lawsuit alleges. First, the company hires large numbers of H-1B workers. Over from 2011 to 2013, Tata sponsored nearly 21,000 new H-1B visas, all primarily Indian workers, according to the lawsuit’s count. Second, when Tata hires locally, “such persons are still disproportionately South Asian,” and, third, for the “relatively few non-South Asians workers that Tata hires,” it disfavors them in placement, promotion and termination decisions.

Steven Heldt, who filed the lawsuit against India’s largest software exporter in a San Francisco federal court on Tuesday, has alleged that a “substantial anti-American sentiment” prevailing in the company led to his termination.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, claims that 95% of the 14,000 people Tata employs in the U.S. are South Asian or mostly Indian. It says this practice has created a “grossly disproportionate workforce.”

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, is similar to a lawsuit filed last year against Infosys by the same Washington firm, Kotchen & Low LLP, in federal court in Wisconsin. Both cases have the potential of putting a new light on the operations of the H-1B-dependent offshore outsourcing industry and its use of visa workers.

Heldt, who worked at TCS for about 20 months, has further alleged that nearly 95 percent of TCS’s 14,000 US employees are of South Asian origin, mainly from India. Heldt began the process leading up to a lawsuit by filing a complaint under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission.

Despite being “highly skilled” with experience of around 20 years in information technology (IT), he was asked to do tasks that did not require much skills, Heldt said.

He has also accused the company of keeping him on bench while allowing the South Asian employees to do the job that was originally assigned to him.

However, TCS in its response, has dismissed Heldt’s claims as “baseless” and said it will defend against the allegations made by him, according to Benjamin Trounson, a US spokesman for Mumbai-based company said in a statement, according to Computerworld.

“TCS is an equal opportunity employer, and as such, bases its employment decisions—including recruiting, hiring, promotions, retention, and discipline—on legitimate non-discriminatory business reasons without regards to race, national origin” and other characteristics protected by law, he said.

In regard to its U.S. hiring, Trounson said last year alone it recruited more than 2,600 U.S. hires, “many of whom are working on technologies and systems that support critical client needs and help to drive America’s innovation economy.”

Whether they are won or lost, the publicity educates readers on proper and improper conduct from HR,” Conroy said.

Further, the lawsuit contends that TCS hires H-1B workers in large numbers, a practice that led to “grossly disproportionate workforce.” It says TCS sponsored nearly 21,000 new H-1B visas during 2011-2013.

The lawsuit against the company comes at a time when a bipartisan group of 10 US Senators are demanding a probe by federal authorities into the practice of replacing US IT workers with others by companies, using H-1B visas.

With this lawsuit, Conroy said, “we can start the process of exonerating the American IT workforce who have been relentlessly denigrated in order to hide the tech industry’s widespread practice of discriminating against Americans.”