Aug 07, 2026 16:04 pm IST

Opinion | The Age Of The Pink Slip: Why India's IT Layoffs Feel Different This Time

The four biggest IT firms, TCS, Infosys, HCLTech, and Wipro, removed a net 9,100 people in the April-June quarter this year. A year earlier, in the same quarter, they had added 22,622.

Subimal Bhattacharjee Subimal Bhattacharjee Columnist

Subimal Bhattacharjee Columnist

On the morning of July 29, a lot of Visa staff in India opened their laptops to an HR email telling them not to come in. Their jobs were gone. Visa is cutting about 2,600 roles worldwide, about 7% of its people, and India, its biggest tech base outside America, took a real hit. By early August, the axe had climbed the org chart to vice-presidents, senior directors, and engineering leads. A US filing on July 31 logged 320 losses at its California headquarters alone. One India team of 28, employees told reporters, lost ten.

Visa's official line is that this is about efficiency and reinvesting for growth, and that AI is only one reason among several. Worth noting the company is making plenty of money and isn't leaving India. This isn't a struggling business trimming fat. It's a profitable one, deciding it needs fewer humans.

Visa is not an outlier either. TCS, the country's largest private employer, said this summer it would let go of about 12,200 managers under a "future-ready transformation". Look at the full year, and the picture is uglier: net headcount down 23,460, ending March at 584,519. The four biggest IT firms, TCS,........

© NDTV