Nasscom chief warns AI is squeezing India's IT freshers out

The president of India's top tech lobby told Nikkei Asia that fresh engineering graduates are in trouble.

"From a fresher's point of view, it is a concern, (and) I will not sugarcoat it any differently," Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar said in the interview from Bengaluru. Basic coding and software testing, the work that has traditionally handed graduates their first jobs at firms like TCS and Infosys, is being automated.

The numbers behind the warning: Nasscom's own review projects roughly 6 million direct tech jobs in FY26, but a net addition of just 135,000, a 2.3% year-over-year rise. India's colleges keep feeding the pipe at 2.6 million engineering and technology enrollments across 5,903 institutions in the fiscal year ending March 2026, per FourWeekMBA's write-up of the same interview.

The IT majors are visibly reshaping. TCS posted 0.5% sequential revenue growth in the July-September quarter while its AI revenue rose 19% on an annualized basis to $3.1 billion. Infosys clocked 29% quarter-on-quarter AI revenue growth and trimmed its FY27 revenue growth forecast to 1-2%.

Nambiar's fix is a joint AI undergraduate curriculum, which Nasscom is designing with the UGC and other agencies, and which he expects to take about six months to approve.

"If our education system is unable to make that transition very quickly, students will come out with skill sets which may be very obsolete already," Nambiar said, adding that "the level of transformations required in the curriculum has never been this significant."

Jobs-and-AI stories keep landing: the Bank of England just pegged UK AI productivity gains at 0.5% over three years with firms cutting hiring not headcount.