Infosys to hire 20,000 this year, says job cuts report exaggerated

IT services major Infosys today said it will hire 20,000 people this year as against only 400 people being asked to leave on performance grounds and termed reports of large-scale job losses as “overstated”.

Infosys COO UB Pravin Rao said the technology-driven transformation presents new opportunities for companies like Infosys.

“With respect to all the talks of layoffs, it’s regular performance based things that we do every year. The number is really 300-400, which is consistent with what we have seen every year,” Rao told reporters after a 30-minute meeting with IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

He said the country’s second largest software exporter is “creating more jobs, adding more people and letting go of only minuscule number of people, purely from performance related perspective”.

Rao met the minister along with Infosys co-Chairman Ravi Venkatesan. He declined however to comment on views of Infosys co- founder NR Narayana Murthy that jobs can be protected if the senior executives of companies take salary cuts and invest in employee re-skilling.

Prasad also asserted that IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys continue to hire in large numbers.

“TCS has written that they have employed 2.5 lakh people in last 3 years and this year they are going to employ 20,000 more…all this talk of sluggishness is unwarranted,” he said.