Tech Mahindra Will Fire These 5000 Employees Due To Rise In Automation: Humans No Longer Needed?

The field of Business Process Services has been an advanced transformation of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and has established a stronghold on various sectors like finance, healthcare, IT, Telecom, travel as well as government sectors. This business segment that provides has grown rapidly over the years and has provided employment to millions of people.

However, the leading company in the IT sector, Tech Mahindra has recorded a drop in the count of BPS employees in the last financial year due to an increase in automation.

How Many BPS Employees has Tech Mahindra Lost?

The CEO and Managing Director of Tech Mahindra, C P Gurnani, has revealed that his company has lost nearly 2500 employees working in the BPS sector in the last quarter of FY2020. He revealed the company had nearly 50,000 BPS employees at the start of last financial year but ended it with just 43,000 employees. 

Moreover, he is expecting the count to fall even further in 2021 and has predicted that the company will be left with 38,000 employees at the end of the current financial year,

The reason for these mass job losses is the increase in productivity and revenue. Also, businesses are getting more and more automated because of the use of artificial intelligence. Besides, the technology has enabled multitasking for an individual.

Reacting on this development, Harpreet Saluja, who is the President, Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate NITES said, “This is an old tactic adopted by the IT sector organization’s to layoff employees illegally. Earlier the company used an excuse of business loss due to Corona Virus pandemic for removing employees and now automation. Tech Mahindra has already received a notice from Labour Commissioner office Pune for violating Government orders pertaining to Covid 19 pandemic. We urge employees to not fall in trap and resist if they are forced to resign. As the yearly appraisal of employees is near Tech Mahindra has again stated an excuse to remove employees to increase their profits which is sheerly unethical. We strongly condemn this layoff tactic and request the State Government to take necessary steps immediately.”

Is The BPS Sector Dying?

Though a drop in employment is registered currently, the BPS sector won’t die any time soon since companies are looking forward to outsourcing more services. According to Gurnani, this current tendency of mass deployment will change in the future. He expects that as the revenue grows, the reduction in the number of employees will stabilize.

He said that everyone is trying to make themselves more productive and efficient and the employees are succeeding in it. They are also assisted by advanced technologies like chatbots which are helping them to do more tasks and achieve more productivity.

On the other hand, the BPS president of Tech Mahindra, Ritesh Idnani, highlighted the importance of data analytics and artificial intelligence in customer operations. He also told that the company is investing its current revenues to fulfill the expectations of the customers.

TechM had recorded a growth of 11% in revenues generated through BPS in the December quarter as compared to the September quarter of FY2020. “You will see that there is a non-linearity between revenue growth and headcount,” Indrani said, analyzing previous patterns.

How Is Tech Mahindra Operating Currently?

The IT major has given up on some of the spaces that it rented before since the work dynamics shifted to online mode. However, the company did not gain significantly out of it. It is expecting 40% of the employees according to work requirements, to join physically very soon. 

Tech Mahindra is also planning to partner with telecom companies since it has invested in 5G services, The company is indifferent regarding the delay in revenue booking for the same.