Chalgenius News | TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL, Tech Mahindra, Other IT Firms To Lay Off 30 Lakh Employees

Leading IT majors TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, Cognizant and others are planning to lay off as many as 30 lakh employees. This massive lay off exercise will be carried out by 2022. The move will help these companies save a whopping USD 100 billion mostly in salaries annually and robot process automation (RPA) up-skilling, according to a report.

“TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and others appear to be planning for a 3 million reduction in low-skilled roles by 2022 because of RPA up-skilling,” the Nasscom report says.

“This is a USD 100-billion in reduced salary and other costs, but on the flipside, it offers a likely a USD 10 billion boon for IT companies that successfully implement RPA, and another a
USD5 billion opportunity from a vibrant new software niche by 2022. Given that robots can function for 24 hrs a day, this represents a significant saving of up to 10:1 versus the human
labor,” says the report.

Meanwhile, the report has also claimed that emerging economies mostly India and China face the most risk of technology driven disruptions which can impact up 85 per cent of jobs in countries like Kenya and Bangladesh. India and China are at greatest risk of skills disruption, while Asean, the Persian Gulf and Japan are at the least risk.

Roughly 0.7 million roles are expected to be replaced by RPA alone and the rest due to other technological upgrades and upskilling by the domestic IT players, while it the RPA will have the worst impact in the US with a loss of almost 1 million jobs, according to a Bank of America report on Wednesday.

Another key reason for the RPA-driven job loses is that many countries that had offshored their work in the past are likely to bring the jobs back to their own home markets. Developed countries will also look to increasingly bring back offshored IT jobs and either use native IT workers or domestic software robots like RPA to secure their digital supply chain and ensure future resiliency of their national technology infrastructure, reasons the report.