Indian IT’s Trust Deficit Widens as TCS Wields the Axe

The safe-house myth of Indian IT has been shattered. For decades, companies like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd symbolised job security and upward mobility. This earnings season turned that perception on its head, as TCS announced plans to shed 12,000 employees over the coming year, 2% of its workforce, the largest layoff in the history of Indian IT.

The company blamed “skill mismatches” and the inability to redeploy staff, rather than Artificial Intelligence or automation. The explanation, while plausible on paper, cuts deeper when weighed against TCS’s own reskilling narrative. After years of boasting about training 550,000 employees on digital basics and 100,000 on advanced technologies, the company now claims redeployment is “impossible”. That disconnect has unsettled both markets and middle management, raising uncomfortable questions about the true value of those investments.

At its core, the crisis is about adaptability. The real test of a “future-ready” enterprise is not how swiftly it trims costs but how effectively it repurposes capacity. Mid-career professionals are discovering that the conveyor belt of digital learning halts abruptly if they cannot pivot from project manager to product specialist. It is a brutal reshaping of which skills count and who gets counted out.

TCS’s leadership language has been saturated with references to being “future-ready” and “navigating a difficult but necessary transition.” Strip away the carefully crafted memos and ritualistic offers of “support,” and what emerges is a sector undergoing a behavioural reset. For employees, the shockwaves extend well beyond the corporate floor.

A call last week with a relative in Thiruvananthapuram put a human face to the statistics. His grandson, a software engineer in

Bengaluru, and his fiancée at another IT major had spent months planning a wedding and a new apartment. Those plans are now frozen in uncertainty, replaced by a sobering fallback of refurbishing his parents’ home instead. Their companies have not even announced layoffs yet, but anxiety has already seeped deep into family life.

The unease has spilled into industrial corridors too. The National Information Technology Employees Senate has written to Union Labour Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, calling the layoffs “unethical and inhumane” and alleging violations of Indian labour law. Its president, Harpreet Singh Saluja, accused TCS of bypassing mandatory notice periods and shoving out mid- to senior-level staff, many with over a decade of service, without warning or explanation.

Unions have also seized on an uncomfortable contrast, as 12,000 jobs vanish while CEO K. Krithivasan’s compensation for 2024–2025 stood at ₹265 million, 329 times the median salary. Such optics feed into a broader debate over fairness and the erosion of trust in India’s employment ecosystem.

This moment is not just about one company or one earnings season. It tests the ability of India’s tech giants to balance shareholder demands with employee morale, and to align lofty promises of reskilling with on-the-ground realities of client work. Treating talent as disposable may deliver short-term relief, but it corrodes long-term loyalty and brand equity.

Indian IT once prided itself on building not just software, but careers. As the industry confronts shifting client demands and generational workforce anxieties, the challenge is no longer simply about being “future-ready.” It is about restoring faith — in leadership, in learning, and in the promise that transformation will include those asked to carry it out.