According to news on July 9, as the world's largest "reserve army of code farmers", India has more than 1.5 million computer science graduates entering the workplace every year, and relies on low labor dividends to support the world's number one software outsourcing industry.
Under the wave of generative AI, this pillar industry that supports the Indian economy is facing an unprecedented impact on survival.
The current Indian technology job market has cooled across the board, with active technology job vacancies falling to a 28-month low. Among them, entry-level technology job vacancies with less than two years of work experience have plummeted 44% year-on-year, and nearly half of entry-level jobs have disappeared.
The impact is not limited to the grassroots, middle and senior management positions with annual salaries of millions of rupees are also not immune:While leading companies are optimizing their senior employees on a large scale, they are also completely tightening the entrance to school recruitment, significantly narrowing the channels for newcomers to enter the industry.
On the surface, this crisis is about AI replacing manpower, but in essence, it is the explosion of structural contradictions accumulated in the Indian IT industry over the past thirty years.
In the past, the prosperity of India's outsourcing industry was based on the path of arbitrage of cheap manpower. A large number of local technology elites flowed to Silicon Valley. Although most of the CEOs of giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Adobe were of Indian origin, they did not leave local technology product companies with core competitiveness.
Entering the AI era driven by computing power, the number of GPUs in India is only 38,000, less than a fraction of that of a single American technology giant. The gap in underlying technical capabilities is completely exposed.
In the face of industry changes, Indian outsourcing giants are not taking any action. They have promoted AI skills training for all employees in an attempt to prove their AI service capabilities to customers.
But ironically, the more companies demonstrate the efficiency of AI to customers, the more customers tend to skip outsourcers and directly use AI tools to complete basic development work, falling into the paradox of becoming more passive as they transform.