India’s top four IT companies saw a net addition of just 1,940 employees in Q3, the lowest in the last eight quarters.
Illustration: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur
In the introduction to Kris Gopalakrishnan’s Against All Odds: The IT Story of India, author Gurcharan Das wrote: “The quiet economic and social revolution unleashed by IT is the cheeriest story of India’s recent economic ascent...” In the same book, Infosys Founder NR Narayana Murthy is quoted saying that along with investing adequately in research and development, improving work productivity, and enhancing innovation capabilities, “our job is to attract the best and the brightest”. Industry body Nasscom says the Indian IT industry directly employed 5.1 million people in FY22, and generated $226 billion in revenue.
IT services has been the Indian middle class’s dream since the early ’90s. However, the recent turn of events represents another story. These diary entries (see below) of tech workers represent the predicament the sector is going through.
(This story appears in the 21 April, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)