It’s a Friday afternoon in March when I meet Sashi* at the nondescript Coffee Home in Delhi’s Connaught Place. Seating ourselves among the crowd of 20-somethings whiling away the afternoon, and retirees in no hurry to get anywhere, Sashi clearly seemed out of place. His job of 21 years at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) rarely took him outside the office at this time of day.

“I’m on forced leave now, they have told me not to come to office and they’ll let me know once they decide on my future with the company,” says the 47-year-old, as we sip cold coffee, which he insists on paying for. “I am, or at least I was, a senior consultant and have been with the company for most of my life. Even during the recession it was not this bad, but now everyone has been told, apparently only verbally, not to enlist seniors in any projects. It’s alright that they are making us leave. I only wish they had told us ahead, so we would have been better prepared. I have worked in IT all my life; now I don’t know what to do when the inevitable happens. Maybe I will begin selling properties in Rohini, in east Delhi, near my house… We have been abandoned in the middle of nowhere.”

Rudraneil*, in Kolkata, feels he was asked to resign from Wipro because he had become too costly for them. The 39-year-old had been a programme analyst for 10 years. “Despite repeated requests, they refused to take me back. I have now started on a PhD, and to support my family I give tuitions to candidates appearing for competitive exams,” he says. Apart from earning much less, he is uncomfortable with the strange looks he gets from people for giving tuitions after holding an IT job.

The retrenchment numbers vary from 3,000 to 12,000 and even 25,000, depending on who you ask. During December 2014 and January 2015, the IT sector appears to have been cleaning house, getting rid of high-earning mid-level employees. The restructuring, despite the sector’s lower growth rates in recent years, was so sudden and without warning that most of those who lost jobs feel they have been left in the lurch by once-trusted employers.

Bolt from the blue

“It was only last April that I got promoted as assistant consultant. I was working on a project with a client and was the senior-most resource,” says 32-year-old Sarita Tripathi, who recently lost her job with TCS. “On December 24, I was suddenly relieved from the project, and within a week I was asked to leave. No room for negotiations, nothing. The ironic part is that only last November I had interviewed around 20 candidates for a job with the company.”

The recent flurry of IT terminations took the employees completely by surprise.

Naveen Hasija, a 53-year-old senior consultant at TCS with 29 years in the industry, was removed from a government PSU project and subsequently asked to leave the company. “See, for them it’s much easier to get a person at much lower wages. Why pay someone ₹100 when you can get three others at the same price,” says Hasija. “The management was told not to induct senior employees into their groups,” he adds.

At the IT majors, the Resource Management Group (RMG) is charged with finding new projects for employees on the ‘bench’ — namely, a reserve pool. “When the RMG doesn’t reallocate, it affects our ratings. My ratings have always been a consistent ‘C’ (or ‘meets company’s expectations’) and most people fall in the same band. But it was the seniors who were asked to resign.”

Hasija and Tripathi are among the handful of terminated TCS employees who have taken their grievances to the labour courts, where the company initially argued that they were ‘managers’ and didn’t come under the purview of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947. That contention was however overruled and the cases are currently under trial.

When BLink approached TCS for comment, a mail from its corporate communications team stated that they “do not want to participate in this story”.

In the legal dispute with their former employer, the likes of Hasija and Tripathi have found an ally in the Chennai-based Forum for IT Employees (FITE). Formed in late-December in the immediate aftermath of the retrenchment, the forum has steadily grown in numbers. Senthil Kumar Tyagarajan, a volunteer with FITE says, “Though they term it as performance-driven workforce optimisation, it is in fact systematic profit-driven terminations. If the companies were retrenching employees in large numbers, they should have informed the government about the reasons for it. A worker without fundamental rights is a slave, regardless of whether we name them as assistant systems engineer, software professional, or whatever. The failure of IT employees to come together and voice their rights has put them in this precarious situation.”

Shaping up

Accounting for over 31 lakh employees, or nearly a quarter of the workforce in the organised private sector, the IT industry is one of the biggest employers in the country. From a robust 30 per cent during the boom years a decade ago, the sector’s growth rate has fallen to 10-15 per cent.

Global analytics firm Crisil had in its November 2014 report ‘For IT service aspirants, job opportunities will narrow’ predicted a slowdown in the coming quarters. “The IT sector is at a crossroads today,” says Anuj Sethi, director, Crisil Ratings. “It is mostly the mid-level employees who are laid-off. Current organisational structures at IT majors have been thrown out of whack, with the entry-level employees hired en masse during the 2000s moving up the ladder to become top- or mid-level employees. Hence the current organisational structure would represent an hour-glass — top-heavy. The downsizing is more towards correcting and moving back to the pyramid structure.” With IT service requirements undergoing changes, many skill sets such as supervision are becoming redundant. “Employees would need to re-skill themselves for emerging technologies like SMAC (social, mobility, analytics and cloud),” says Sethi.

Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president and a 25 years veteran with IT lobby group National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) feels the job-loss fears are overstated.

“The industry touched $50 billion in 2009 and $100 billion in 2013-14. So, clearly, growth rates are at 12-13 per cent, but the industry now has a much larger base and is able to grow and build on that,” she says. According to her, the problem, if any, was that not enough has been done to communicate to the middle-management group what was expected of them or equipping them to retrain. Nasscom aims to redress this through a new programme called Reboot and Refresh for mid-level workers.

Future tense

Nasscom’s efforts appear well-intentioned, but with most IT majors announcing tepid quarterly results, the mid-level exodus will likely be unabated.

Labour rights experts call for drastic overhauls in labour regulation. “Most labour laws in India are from a pre-IT era,” points out Babu Ramesh, the associate professor at IGNOU who is famous for coining the term ‘cyber coolies’ when researching IT labour in the early 2000s. “There is a need for redefining things, take into consideration changes in the business order.” Bobby Kunhu, a human rights lawyer who was a part of FITE’s fact-finding team looking into the TCS layoffs, agrees. “The arbitrariness and the sudden firing of these employees is inhuman,” he says. “You are paid well, live a certain lifestyle for many years and, one day, you are suddenly asked to leave. I feel the underlying problem is a total lack of government regulations. Unfortunately, the recent layoffs are only the beginning, and more and larger numbers of people will definitely be affected over the next year. The TCS episode is only the tip of the iceberg.”

(* Names changed on request.)

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