Woes of the Indian IT Industry

Global recession has hit the Indian IT industry hard. An article in the Outlook Magazine captures the worsening woes of the Indian IT industry. Things have become so bad according to some anecdotal accounts, if you are an eligible bachelor working for an IT company, your chances of finding a groom are lets say abysmal. The paragraphs below capture the contrast between the heady days of 2005 and 2006, when an IT job was a sure shot ticket to wealth, and the woes of today.

Multiple job offers and generous pay hikes were nothing unusual in the IT industry. Talent was hard to come by. Companies had to pay plenty in cash, bonuses, perks and stock options to retain existing employees, and attract new hires by the thousands. New contracts from US clients were flowing in easily and IT companies had a simple formula for success: they could grow as much as they could hire. They often behaved like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They hired indiscriminately.

The city’s IT wealth was once the envy of the rest of the nation. The software professional was once the dream job of millions of students. There were over 10,000 individual dollar millionaires (with an investible surplus of Rs 4.5 crore) and 60,000 super-rich people (investible surplus of Rs 50 lakh) in the city in 2006. Bangaloreans invested Rs 22,000 crore in mutual funds in March 2006, up from Rs 8,000 crore in June 2004, according to a study by American Express. But all the fame and wealth of the IT professional is slowly melting away.

Pubs in Bangalore are empty; one is even offering “recession discounts”. Real estate prices, both housing and commercial, are sliding. The Promoters and Builders Association of Pune has launched a scheme where the developer will pay three EMIs in case a customer loses a job. Senior officials in a private sector bank confirm employees in the IT sector are in the negative list of borrowers. Many jobless are putting their cars and houses up for sale. Parents don’t want to marry their daughters to IT professionals.

Read the complete article at Woes of the Indian IT Industry