IT's new frontier: Why companies in India have significantly cut down on hirings Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis

The global economic crisis and increased competition have led to a situation where Indian IT companies have been forced to improve productivity and quote lower prices to win deals. This week, Infosys rubbished reports that it was laying-off 3,500 workers, after losing a key project to implement technology solutions for the Royal Bank of Scotland. While the debacle was triggered by Britain's exit from the European Union, it is important for India to prepare for a scenario where the IT and BPO industries will no more be the major job creators that they were in the past. New recruitment in the IT industry has fallen consistently from 2.35 lakh in 2013, and could be significantly less this fiscal compared to the 2 lakh jobs created in 2015-16. When India was at the cusp of the IT boom, the considerable labour arbitrage was an attractive draw for big companies to shift their back-end operations and low-grade coding, maintenance and testing functions to India.