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Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services firm, has announced plans to reduce its workforce by around 2% over the year, impacting approximately 12,000 employees globally. The layoffs will primarily affect employees in the middle and senior levels, the company said in an official statement.
“TCS is on a journey to become a Future-Ready organisation. This includes strategic initiatives on multiple fronts, including investing in new-tech areas, entering new markets, deploying AI at scale for our clients and ourselves, deepening our partnerships, creating next-gen infrastructure, and realigning our workforce model,” the company stated.
The development comes at a time when the Indian IT sector has recorded a slowdown in hiring. According to industry data, the top six IT companies hired only 3,847 employees in the April-June quarter of 2025, compared to 13,935 hires in the January-March period, which is a decline of 72%.
TCS CEO and MD K Krithivasan, in an interview with Moneycontrol, said the layoffs would not be carried out immediately and affected employees would be identified in a phased manner throughout the year.
“It’s a process through which we identify the people. We won’t do it in a hurry. We will first talk to those who could be impacted. We will provide them an opportunity,” he said.
According to Krithivasan, the company will follow its internal human resources policies and offer various forms of support to outgoing employees, including extended insurance coverage, outplacement services, and counselling assistance.
“We will provide appropriate benefits… HR has a good policy on how we will do it. We are employing agencies for outplacement support as well,” he added.
Following the announcement, the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) issued a statement condemning what it described as “massive retrenchments” at TCS. The union alleged that many employees are being asked to resign and referred to the Industrial Disputes Act, stating that forced resignation is not legally permissible under the law.
“As per the Industrial Disputes Act, it is an offence on the part of an employer to force an employee to resign. An employee has all the legal right to refuse to sign the resignation,” the union stated.
The All India Professionals Congress said that it is in talks with IT employee unions and plans to raise the issue of layoffs in Parliament. They said they would demand a cap on how much top leaders could earn compared to average employees to help reduce job cuts.