Best wishes for a jobless new year?

BANGALORE, INDIA: When the news of the global recession started emerging, no one did think that it was only the tip of the iceberg. But it did not take much time for the whirlwind of economic disaster to shake the entire world.

Though the IT giants tried to play it down in the beginning, things changed very soon and the axe started falling on the employees.

Pink slip became the order of the day and new hirings were frozen. From IBM and Yahoo to TCS and Infosys, the sky became overcast with the cloud of joblessness.

As per estimates more than 10000 people became jobless in the IT/BPO sectors in India during the last three months and in the coming six months nearly 50000 more will become jobless, warns Karthik Shekhar, general secretary, UNITES, a trade union of the techies in the country.

Though Nasscom projects an optimistic picture of the growth of the IT sector in India, the ground reality is embarrassing according to him. And things are set to become even worse.

“When we said a few months back that 10000 people will become jobless in the IT sector, everybody laughed it off, but now you can see what has happened,” he pointed out, while talking to CyberMedia News.

There are many reasons for this condition, including the conditions in the bailout packages under the new US regime and tightening procedures with regard to H1B visas.

In the bail out packages in the US the financial institutions have said that the US companies should not outsource works to India, he pointed out. Also one should wait and see what Barack Obama will do after he takes charge as the US president because he had clearly played the anti-outsourcing card during the campaign.

“Though it can be argued that India should look at the emerging market for more outsourcing works, if it is not coming from the US and the UK, it is not that simple to hunt for new market overnight,” he argues.

“In India, when one person becomes jobless, the entire family suffers – from parents to kids. There are reports that many people are finding it difficult to send their kids to the schools even,” he pointed out. Despite all this techies are still unorganized, laments Shekhar.

“In India, techies at the entry level comprise an unorganized sector and this makes things even more serious,” says Shekhar. Taking all these things into consideration, 2009 will be a bleak year for the techies. So what should we wish the techies, a jobless new year?!