 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have been reading in newspapers that there has been massive retrenchment in IT sector to discuss the issue we are joined by Kiran Janra. Kiran has been working among the IT professionals and has been organizing them for more than a decade and is also associated with forum for IT professionals. So welcome to NewsClick. Kiran, we are glad to have you on this platform. So what is this massive retrenchment in the IT sector that is going on and what are the reasons behind it? There have been retrenchments in the IT industry and the number is quite scary and at the moment we know that one of the important reasons for the retrenchments that is happening now is the automation inside the IT industry. IT industry benefited or employment was generated in the IT industry because globally there was an automation of the business and as well as manufacturing and other industrial processes. So primarily the job creation in India was completely dependent on the external factors like getting the business on the outsourced business model. So there is a shift that is happening now in the information technology services, they themselves are being subjected to automation and hence we see a job cut in this IT industry. And the second important factor is that globally also if you look at the various governments and the decisions that they are taking from the GA, which are primarily where the large section of our business comes from, all these countries have started becoming protectionists and once they become protectionists, they are also altering the way in which jobs really come to India. So this is the second important reason for which there is a reduction in the job. And the third reason is precisely the policy paralysis which has been stuck in India for the last three decades. So they have been only looking at creation of job opportunities just depending on the US economy rather than looking at how do we build it across in the Indian context. And these, so our complete industry has been or you could say the entire nation's skill set has been driven to serve the US market. If you look at this entire phenomena, is it a temporary one, a permanent one? And I mean, so what actually it is what the Indian companies not prepared for it? You see all these numbers that you are given that the media is giving two lakhs, 58,000, all these things are really originating from Mackinsey's report. Mackinsey came out and it started giving out a report saying that the entire Indian IT of the entire Indian IT workforce 50% of them might become redundant in the coming three years. And this is something very nasty. It is not true. We'll have to look at the politics behind such a statement coming out. Why did Mackinsey give such a statement? If you look at the people who came out of engineering colleges, the people who are graduating out of the engineering colleges or professional courses at the time of Y2K or maybe in the year 1994 to 96 and 98 so on and so forth, a certain their skill set and the capability was very less when compared to the graduates who are coming out. If you just take the mean of the students today, they would be at least four or five times more skilled than the students who came out then. And the IT industry, for instance, even the US absorbed everybody because they had an urgency to shift or come out of the problem of Y2K with given the computing capabilities of the computers being low end and the dependence on the main frames, all the workforce had to be shifted or pulled into US to really to save the Y2K problem. And they accepted the very low skill set employees at that point of time. And today they're coming out with a very nasty argument saying that Indian skill set is redundant, which is far from true. The thing is, you fairly come out and say that, yes, we are going ahead with the automation of technologies. And as a sense also, now you see even the entire automation of technologies is where really the concept of Intellectual Property of Colise. So all these automation of technologies, everything they have, they want the concentration to be in the US. Where does Google have its servers? Where does Facebook have its servers? The whole of data commodification or if it is the concept of the new kind of a capitalist capitalism that is really building out their own data, because today everybody realizes that anyone who holds control and data is going to have a control on the world. And that is where you see that all these new automated jobs are really concentrating themselves in the US. So this, when they want to really, there's a shift in the way in which things are operating. And now they wanted to, rather than speaking out the reality, this Indian IT workforce is being made a scapegoat. And even if you look at the skill set of the IT professionals, any conventional industry, when there is a phase shift of technology or when an engineer or an employee becomes redundant or he becomes, the complete new technology is introduced into an industry, there is a lag. At least there is a lag of 15, 20 years or 30 years. There will be either chemical engineering, drug manufacturing, or any of these things. But now you see, when you look at the IT industry, if you look at from the days of the Y2K, we have had three or four phase shifts of technology. And this generation, now you also, everybody is speaking out saying that the average age of IT industry is already 29. It means that people about 30 years, 35 years are significant in number in the IT industry, along with the new kind of recruits that are there in the industry. When there is a significant, the age group of 30, 35 essentially means that everybody has got an experience at an average of at least 10 to 15 years of experience in the industry. And everyone has gone through at least three phase shifts of technology. Nobody today is really working on the same technology the day he was really recruited into. So this phase shift of technology when the workforce has really upscaled or upgraded itself to the contemporary situation, you are coming out to blame the workforce, making them scapegoat, creating a very unhealthy environment to them, bringing their capability of really competing in the market tomorrow, giving them a baggage of a non-perfer. But these are very serious issues which needs to be contested also. So as you are explaining, it looks like a fairly permanent situation which is going to impact a large number of people. On one hand, the government has been continuously talking about scale India, make in India, and then we have this. How do you see it? What will be the impact of this on the Indian economy and the IT sector? It's not just the IT sector alone. We'll have to really look at what this government is speaking and what is it doing. When you look at the Indian part and Indian response, it is such an uneasy thing for the entire workforce who has really voted this government in. Of course, I don't want to get into the reasons was it right or wrong. But how are the things really translating? If you look at when an IT professional passes away in the US, all of them really jump into the bandwagon of creating sympathy factor, tweeting about Sushma Swara's tweets about it, Narendra Modi starts tweeting about it, all the IT ministers of the respective states tweet about the arrival of the dead body. And they try to intervene and see that they are someone who want to do a certain thing. Why is it that the Indian government is not really getting into the international parliament contesting these kinds of actions by the nations like US? The central government, not the Sushma Swaraj, not the Labor Ministry, not the IT ministry, not the Prime Minister have not even said a single word against this. It is a shameful thing. You just look at Ravishankar Prasad's speech, which is on record honorable IT minister on the day of announcing the digital India program. What does he say? He says that in a couple of years from now, you have, in a couple of years from now, you have the IT industry, IT import, sorry, IT importers with electronic components and services import into the India would be coming, which is 7 odd percentile now, is likely to go up to 35 percent, which will be equal to that of the oil deficit. We need to come out. So this problem definition has been given by the IT minister himself. So once you are clear about that, and you see the IT and also the industry captains came out, do a huge announcement of saying that. I remember that from the media reports, it was everybody placed 18.5 lakh crores of rupees into the Indian industry, saying that they will be setting up industry. But now when you look back and see, see the pathetic part of it, even the SIM cards which Reliance Geo has distributed in a massive way, they say about 100 million internet connectivity in less than a year, blah, blah, blah, blah. But essentially, whatever, all the SIM cards were imported from China. So there isn't anything that this government is really doing it. And they almost promised about expansion of huge data centers. India has got huge internet websites. So there isn't anything that is happening on the ground. You don't have Indian government is not really taking up. We all know how it happens. Even in the earlier days, there would be no corporate company would be coming forward and working in the interest of the Indian nation. So there needs to be a huge public spending that needs to be going into really building up this industry in the interest of India. It is not just about this IT professionals. And also this government has got a huge obligation. The youth of this country has voted for this government. And they don't even, and the dubiousness of this government is that the entire workforce in India, if you look at the engineering statistics, 1.5 million engineers are graduating every year. And how much of them are really absorbing into it. So this is a hollow program and there is a policy paralysis with the government. This government is just pursuing the same policies which Manmohan Singh has pursued being subservient to the American corporations, being subservient to the American nation and only looking at the outsourced business model, which is going to be very costly for the country. So Kiran, this would be my last question looking at the situation which is quite grim. What should be the response of IT employees, forums like forum for IT professionals? What should be the response? What's the way ahead? Our experience of working in the last few years has been that whenever there is been a case that IT professionals have organized themselves inside and collectively went ahead and taken on the corporations, the retrenchments have stopped. Either they were temporary or not, but at least the IT professionals, they were significant with praise. We had it in iGate, which the corporation does not exist anymore. We had it in the case of many other companies, which I would not want to name them now, but there have been instances. So IT professionals need to realize that, yes, we are individuals, we are selling our mental labor or human resources are the elementary things for this industry, and we have bound by the labor laws. We need to collectively organize ourselves inside the industry and we need to move forward with a certain interim demands, which are essential because we have been the well-generators to these corporations. These corporations have the moral responsibility. If there is a phase shift of technology, we are a generation which really went through three changes of the three or at least three variants of technology. Yes, there can be training programs inside the industry to ensure the pre-transition of people into newer projects. And also we need to realize that there is something called as an industrial dispute act, which says just in case, even in the case of layoffs, I don't think there are layoffs, but there are retrenchments, even the case of retrenchments of these kinds, just in case if a company needs to recruit someone else for a project, their law states that the people who have been retrenched from the industry should be given preferential treatment by taking them back into the industry. So it means that avoiding such a situation, if there are a certain tools like manual testing, for instance, automata, some of these areas where jobs are likely to go, in all these avenues, we should ensure that the corporations come forward and we build up sufficient pressure inside the corporations so that they don't really send us out. And we have our own voice inside the industry in any form that is possible. We need to organize ourselves in the form of unions, associations, whatever form it is feasible. And we need to ensure that there is transparency in the process and thereby stop this mad retrenchments and this narrative has to be countered. The narrative that this is an industry of non-performance or underperformance or redundant people has to be countered saying that this is not our problem. This problem is because of the policy paralysis on the part of the government, on the part of the leadership of the industry where both have failed in showing sufficient leadership skills despite we generating three times the salary that I take home to you. And despite society giving you a huge amount of subsidies, it is a failure on your part. And if you don't have a solution, yes, we have a solution and we'll come out with all those solutions, we'll have to implement it. This is the voice that the IT professionals inside the companies need to organize themselves and we are very much in touch with the people, we are in touch with thousands of people and many of them are in touch with us. We are going to work together, work with everyone to ensure that this kind of a narrative is defeated. Thanks a lot Kiran for giving us your time and as these things proceed, we'll be coming back to you on such issues. Thanks a lot. Thank you,