For P Ravikumar (name changed), the large office floor in the media house he worked for ‘looked like a post office last week’.
From the glass walls of the conference room, he saw people hurriedly stamping large stacks of papers.
The next day, he was handed one of those papers, making his worst fears come true.
Seven of his colleagues, also video journalists, were fired. “If all of us go looking for jobs, none of us might find one. There are hardly any jobs in the market anyway,” he says.
Network18 recently cut 350 jobs and more are expected to go in the coming days.
This comes a few months after CNBC-TV18’s rival, NDTV Profit, scaled down its Mumbai operations drastically, resulting in at least 50 jobs being cut.
It’s not media alone -- job losses have started becoming common across sectors.
It has also hit those traditionally known as stable industries.
Educomp Solutions, an education service provider, slashed 3,500 jobs in the past three months, truncating its workforce by almost 20 per cent.
The automobile industry isn’t far behind. Last month, Mahindra & Mahindra laid off 500 temporary workers at its factory sites.
As sales went down, the company also announced production holidays to avoid inventory pile-up and to align with slowing demand.
“We have reduced temporary workers due to the prevailing situation within the auto industry,” a company spokesperson said.
Siemens laid off a little over 200 employees across various units in the country.
It is known to have plans to dismiss 400 more.
Like many of its peers in the capital goods sector, it has been getting fewer orders, as capital expenditure across manufacturing and other industries reduced in recent years.
“As part of the global operations of Siemens, in India, too, we regularly reassess and consequently realign capacities,” a spokesperson said.
From a company’s perspective, job cuts are a necessary pain. Stuck in the midst of a slowing economy, organisations want to chug ahead with lesser burden on their backs.
“Today, when the economic environment poses a challenge to the education sector as a whole, I am proud that Educomp has embarked on a bold strategy to return the company to robust growth.
Although this transition will not be painless, we have to do what we have to do to get growth back on tracks,” said Shantanu Prakash, chairman and managing director of Educomp Solutions.
However, for employees at the receiving end, living with the fear of a possible job loss is like slow poisoning.
Partha Ghosh, 38, in charge of business operations at a technology solutions company, said it was a ‘painful’ exit, for him and colleagues who’d spent a little more than 20
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