India’s top five IT firms added 12,718 workers in FY25. In FY26, they cut 7,389. The reversal isn’t the headline — the reason is.
TCS — whose workplace culture faced its own reckoning — led the contraction with roughly 12,000 positions gone over the year. Infosys lost 8,440 in Q4 alone. Tech Mahindra shed 1,993. Most of it wasn’t a firing event. People left, and the companies simply didn’t backfill them. That’s a quieter story than layoffs. The fresher hiring numbers for next year are quieter still.
TCS Will Hire 25,000 Freshers Next Year. It Used to Hire 40,000.
That single number tells the whole story. Infosys has guided to roughly 20,000 fresher hires for FY27. HCLTech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra haven’t given fixed targets at all — just demand-conditional language that means “we’ll see.”
The campus pipeline that fed India’s IT middle class for two decades is being quietly retired. The bench-and-billing model — hire bodies, park them, send them to a project — assumed growth would absorb the inventory. Growth isn’t doing that anymore.
What Replaced the Hiring
Not AI doing the work. AI making the hiring optional.
“Headcount is a function of utilisation and the volumes we see,” Infosys CFO Jayesh Sanghrajka told analysts. Translation: nobody adds bodies until clients demand it. Utilisation at TCS now runs near 85%; Infosys (excluding trainees) sits at 82.5%. Existing teams handle more work, faster. The bench is shrinking by design.
TCS’s HR head was even more specific: hiring is “concentrated on individuals with expertise in AI, data, cloud, cybersecurity and digital engineering.” Generic coding skills no longer get you in the door — and the H-1B route just narrowed for the same profile abroad.
NASSCOM data confirms the squeeze: the entire tech sector added just 2,000 net jobs YoY. Total workforce — 59.5 lakh — is barely up from 58.2 lakh, even as female workforce participation just hit 35.1%. This is also the second headcount decline in three years; FY24 wiped out 69,167 positions across the same five firms before FY25’s brief recovery.
For five million IT workers, the message is unsubtle — and India’s factory workers are hitting the streets over wages that trail inflation. The hiring engine that built India’s middle class isn’t broken. It just stopped pretending headcount means health. AI didn’t take 7,389 jobs. It took the next 100,000 that were never going to be hired.