As global tech giants shed jobs and AI transforms workflows, India’s IT industry faces a historic reckoning
India’s once unshakeable IT industry, the country’s largest private employer and a backbone of global tech, is in crisis. In 2025 alone, global giants such as Intel, Microsoft and Meta laid off more than 60,000 workers worldwide, with a significant number of those displaced in India. Now, even domestic titans like TCS, Infosys and Wipro are tightening their belts, revealing deep structural shifts in the sector that built modern India’s middle class.
The article in India Today Hindi by MG Arun, opens with the story of Ankit, a Bangalore-based engineer abruptly benched after nearly five years of steady work. His case reflects a new anxiety coursing through India’s tech corridors where employees are expendable in a landscape shaped by cost-cutting, automation and an unforgiving global economy. In July 2025, TCS alone dismissed twelve thousand employees, some two percent of its workforce, despite plans to hire tens of thousands of fresh graduates. Across the top seven IT firms, nearly eight thousand senior professionals have left in the past year.
India’s $282.6 billion IT industry, employing 7.3 million people, has long been the country’s proudest export story, contributing over seven percent of GDP. But post-pandemic “revenge hiring” has given way to overcapacity, while geopolitical instability, shrinking US client budgets and the explosive rise of artificial intelligence have made traditional IT models obsolete. The shift has been brutal: the linear “pyramid” structure built on mass hiring and hierarchical project management is collapsing, replaced by lean, agile, product-focused teams that prioritise value over volume.
Executives and analysts interviewed by India Today Hindi agree that the ground has shifted irreversibly. Automation and generative AI have made routine coding and project coordination redundant. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Anthropic’s Claude can now generate and debug software in seconds, compressing processes that once took hours into minutes. Companies are demanding more from fewer employees, pushing “billability” as the new survival metric.
Yet the crisis is not purely technological. The story details how trade disruptions from Donald Trump’s tariff policies, global trade wars and economic protectionism have forced clients to slash IT budgets. The US, which accounts for seventy percent of India’s IT business, has become a volatile market. Layoffs, stagnant entry-level salaries and reduced hiring point to what experts call a “structural reset” rather than a cyclical downturn.
Veterans such as Kris Gopalakrishnan (co-founder of Infosys) and CP Gurnani (former CEO of Tech Mahindra) urge a mindset shift. The Indian IT industry, they argue, has survived every disruption from mainframes to mobile phones and must now embrace AI not as a threat but as infrastructure. Companies like Infosys and Wipro are retraining hundreds of thousands of employees through internal GenAI academies, while universities are scrambling to integrate AI tools into engineering curricula. Still, many mid-level engineers, especially those aged 30 to 40, are being left behind by the new technological order.
MG Arun’s piece captures this tension between resilience and obsoleteness. The IT sector remains India’s economic spinal cord, but its survival depends on learning faster than the machines it built.
Original article ‘देश में सबसे ज्यादा नौकरियां देने वाले सेक्टर में क्यों आई छंटनी की बाढ़?’ by MG Arun was published in Hindi by India Today Hindi on 11 September 2025.
It is available here.
India Today Hindi is the Hindi-language edition of India Today, one of India’s leading news magazines. Founded in 1975, it is known for its in-depth reporting on politics, economy and social change, with a strong emphasis on accessible yet analytical journalism.
Summary by ZN
