[Information technology services account for 9.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), but now, after decades of boom, the future of the industry seems precarious. Since May, workers’ groups have reported unusually numerous layoffs. The Forum for IT Employees (FITE) estimates that 60,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past few months.]
By
Vidhi Doshi
 |
Workmen prepare an electronic
screen for the Indian tech firm Infosys,
at the World Economic Forum in
(Jason Alden/Bloomberg) (Jason
Alden/Jason Alden/Bloomberg)
|
When
P.R. Sujoy became a software engineer, he thought his life was made. It was a
job his father, a former government employee who prized stability above all, could
brag about to nosy relatives. It came with a highflying salary, enough for a
mortgage and to start a family. So when his company suddenly asked him to
resign, Sujoy refused.
“I’m
an IT guy. That’s all I do,” he said.
Eventually
he was fired, and Sujoy became one more worker in India
Information
technology services account for 9.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic
product, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), but now, after
decades of boom, the future of the industry seems precarious. Since May, workers’
groups have reported unusually numerous layoffs. The Forum for IT Employees (FITE)
estimates that 60,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past few months.
“Employees
are being rated as poor performers so companies can get rid of them,” said
FITE’s Chennai coordinator, Vinod A.J.
IT
companies and some government officials say the numbers have been exaggerated, but
industry experts say the country’s digital wunderkinds have much to fear.
“For
the first time, companies are touching middle management,” said Kris
Lakshmikanth, chief of a recruitment firm called Head Hunters India. “Usually
in IT, people grow with the industry. Every two or three years, salaries
increase, and everyone gets promotions. That’s the norm. In more than 20 years,
I have not seen managers being sacked. Now it is happening everywhere — Pune, Bangalore Hyderabad
Bias
against Indians abroad is also compounding workers’ fears of layoffs and
downsizing at home.
President
Trump has stoked anxiety among Indian techies, who make up the majority of
applicants for the H-1B visa program for highly skilled foreign workers. Trump
has talked about sharply restricting H-1Bs, and this year the number of
applications dropped a staggering 16 percent as companies prepared for Trump’s
immigration cutbacks. Instead, Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys
started recruiting Americans, bowing to Trump’s calls for “America First.”
For
years, India Silicon Valley ’s
menial jobs. According to IBEF, 67 percent of the world’s IT work is outsourced
to India
Over
the past three decades, cities have swelled to accommodate this newly minted
middle class. Residential towers and industrial parks have risen for India
Vinod
said companies are masking layoffs as voluntary resignations based on poor
performance ratings. “They put pressure on employees every day, saying: Resign
— or we will terminate you,” he said. “It allows the company to downsize
without giving the proper compensation.”
A
former employee at Cognizant, Uthamacholan R. said he was asked to resign after
he received a low performance rating from someone who had never worked with him.
“I was rated by my manager’s manager, who didn’t even know what my job title
was,” he said.
Others
at his company had also been rated unfairly and then pressured to hand in
resignations based on poor appraisals, he said. “They are given quotas — like
out of 10 people, you have to give two poor ratings.”
Cognizant
did not reply to The Washington Post’s requests for comment.
In
an email, an Infosys spokeswoman said there had been no layoffs, only
“performance-related separations.”
Industry
leaders dismissed reports of layoffs, saying the media had exaggerated a few
isolated cases. Sangeeta Gupta, a spokeswoman at the National Association of Software
and Services Companies, an industry trade organization, said that yearly
performance appraisals are designed to keep the workforce trim. This, she said,
was crucial in an industry where technological advances such as automation and
artificial intelligence quickly make many jobs and skill sets obsolete.
“Companies
make every effort to re-skill employees who do not perform well, and if they
cannot meet expectations, then they are asked to resign,” she said. But talk of
forced resignations and mass layoffs, she said, was “not even remotely close”
to the truth.“If you’re a publicly listed company, there’s no way you can lie
about shedding employees and get away with it,” she said
Amid
the rumpus over jobs, Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister of electronics and
information technology, met with industry leaders June 18. At a news conference
afterward, he said that companies were not laying off staff. In fact, he said, many
firms are hiring.
The
Modi government scaled back plans to train 500 million workers in a variety of
industries by 2022 as part of its “Skill India
“What
do they think? That they’ll be kept on?” he said of IT workers who had lost
their jobs. “Because of their attitudes, they are considered irrelevant by the
industry.”
Sujoy
and others are looking for new jobs, but are shocked by the new uncertainty.
“There
should be some protection for us,” he said. “I could get another job now, and
they could fire me just as easily.”
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