30 lakh IT professionals to be laid off in India by 2022

With the speed with which the intervention of automation is increasing in the industries, the risk of losing their jobs for the employees working in the field of technology is increasing equally fast.

A report has claimed that domestic software companies, which currently employ 16 million employees, are ready to lay off 30 lakh employees by 2022. This will help them save $100 billion annually.

According to Nasscom, about 16 million people work in the domestic IT sector, out of which about 9 million people work in low-skilled and BPO.

Of these 9 million low-skilled services and BPOs, 30% or about 3 million will lose their jobs by 2022, mainly due to Robotic Process Automation or RPA.

According to the report, companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra and Cognizant and many others are also planning to drive out 3 million low-skilled people by 2022 due to RPA up-skilling.

The report said that India-based resources cost $25,000 annually and US resources $50,000 annually. After the layoff, companies will save about $100 billion on salary and corporate-related expenses.

Roughly 7 lakh people in domestic companies will be replaced by RPA alone. And the rest will be through technology upgrades and upskilling.

While the worst effect of RPA will be in America, according to the report of Bank of America released on Wednesday, jobs of 1 million people can be lost here.

India and China will have the biggest impact of skill disruption. Whereas ASEAN, the Persian Gulf and Japan are at least at risk.

Perhaps the most worrying trend is that emerging market jobs are most vulnerable to automation as the low/middle-skilled nature of sectors such as manufacturing exposes them to the dangers of premature de-industrialisation.

India saw its manufacturing peak in 2002, while it happened in Germany in 1970, Mexico in 1990.

The COVID-19 situation has made the matter more worse, after the minor job losses in February and March, India’s second pandemic wave crashed across the labour market in April, erasing at least 73.5 lakh jobs.

Data from the Centre of Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) showed the number of employees, both salaried and non-salaried, fell from 39.81 crore in March to 39.08 crore in April, in the third straight month of falling jobs.

In January, the number of people employed in India was 40.07 crore, CMIE data showed.

The job losses come in a month of exploding Covid cases, leading to business and mobility curbs across many parts of the country.