Mumbai: Vishal Sikka resigned from Infosys citing the reason of false charges that were levelled against him by likes of Narayan Murthy. But the reality is far deeper than that. The reality is that the software services exports are experiencing their longest slump in seven years.
This could very well result in current account deficit and this could have an effect on the jobs in the country. “Indian service companies gained scale over the last decade as the disrupters, creating the modern offshoring industry, but they are now the incumbents, challenged by a slew of specialized and niche start-ups bred in this new environment,” Arvind Subramanian, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s top economic adviser, said in his economic survey published this month. Growing anti-globalization tendencies “in the U.S. during and after elections and the Brexit referendum” also threaten Indian jobs, he said.
Modi won the 2014 election by promising he will ensure there are enough jobs in the country and in certanity this will be his pledge even in the 2019 elections as well. Tech industry in India is the largest employer in the country in private sector.
The India’s economic survey, however has cited Trump’s ‘Buy American and Hire American’ order and UK’s costly visa as the reasons for limitation in the movement of the Indian engineers. According to a report in NDTV, automation threatens 69 percent of jobs in India, according to a 2016 World Bank report. Executive search firm Head Hunters India estimates that 175,000 to 200,000 technology jobs will be lost in the country each year through 2020, and newspapers are rife with reports of mass layoffs in the sector.
“Hiring momentum remains slow,” NASSCOM, which represents India’s $154 billion information technology and business-process management industry, said in its review for the April-June quarter. However incremental revenue was the strongest in four years and global activity is recovering, it said.
