India's high-tech jobs are disappearing

New Delhi

THEY were going to be India's gilded generation.

When PR Sujoy became a software engineer, he thought his life was made. It was a job his father, a former government employee who prized stability above all, could brag about to nosy relatives. It came with a highflying salary, enough for a mortgage and to start a family. So when his company suddenly asked him to resign, Mr Sujoy refused. "I'm an IT guy. That's all I do," he said.

Eventually he was fired, and Mr Sujoy became one more worker in India's IT sector facing an uncertain future.

Information technology services account for 9.5 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, according to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), but now, after decades of boom, the future of the industry seems precarious. Since May, workers' groups have reported unusually high layoffs. The Forum for IT Employees (FITE) estimates that 60,000 workers have lost their j…