Pink Slips

I was reading an article by Saritha Rai on Indian Express website titled 'I signed the letter, took the cheque and walked out... it was over in five minutes'. The protagonist of the story is a 27-year old professional in India's outsourcing industry who had only seen the good times ... and was sacked unceremoniously from his company, the obvious reason being the "bad market conditions".

What I want to say is, what we always heard of happening in the West has arrived in our Bangalore as well. I think the situation is similar, if not more morbid, in Gurgaon, Noida, Pune or Hyderabad where the outsourcing industry is the mainstay of their economies. During my years of working (2005 - 2007) at Convergys in Gurgaon, I have seen how the young professionals took the advantage of the explosion in the outsourcing industry by hopping companies, demanding and getting handsome pay hikes.

Many of my peers lived a lavish lifestyle on their plastic money; a few of them had bought a house or owned a car by taking loans. I can imagine if some of them lose their jobs in a jiffy may land up in a jobless state with a market debt of Rs. 30 - 40 lacs (60 - 80 thousand US$). Most of these young professionals were spendthrift and had the least propensity towards savings. In the past years the same people who were besieged with jobs are now having the nightmare of "pink slip".

But the recent, serial bust-ups in Wall Street and a recessionary US economy has badly hit Indian outsourcing firms. With American companies — their biggest customers — facing an economic dip, outsourcing companies are cutting back and, in turn, choking the job market. As a ripple effect it is showing up in unexpected ways in Bangalore; restaurants and drinking lounges reporting 30% - 50% dip in revenues, real-estate companies slashing prices of apartments and introducing low-end options, and outsourcing workers switching over to two-wheelers and company cabs rather than driving their cars.