The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Shritama Bose

MUMBAI, April 30 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The jobs crisis stirring in India’s vast outsourcing industry spells trouble for the country’s $4 trillion consumption-led economy. With the gap between household income and spending already widening, the consequences of the churn on finance and markets will be far-reaching.

White collar jobs are starting to disappear in the world’s services capital where many global firms employ thousands of staff in global capability centres that are responsible for everything from back-office functions to fraud detection to critical research and development.

Following the launch of artificial intelligence tools by Anthropic and others that allow companies do the same amount of work with fewer people, Oracle ORCL.N laid off 10,000 workers, or one-fifth of its India workforce in March, and Amazon.com AMZN.O let go of 500 people in the country in January, the Economic Times reported, citing sources. It looks like just the beginning of the headcount reductions.

One executive of a global bank told Reuters Breakingviews their workforce in India could shrink by one-third. This could happen quickly within just one or two years because of the double digit attrition rates at offices of global firms in cities including Bengaluru, Gurugram and Pune. JPMorgan Chase JPM.N has a whopping 55,000 employees in the country, which equals about one-fifth of its total workforce and includes one-third of all its technologists; HSBC’s HSBA.L 47,000 local employees make up 23% of its global headcount.

Then there is also “AI deflation” – the term Indian IT firms that typically lap up fresh graduates use to refer to slowing revenue growth. Annual revenue in U.S. dollar terms at industry leader Tata Consultancy Services TCS.NS shrunk for the year ended March 2026, marking the first decline since the $97 billion company's initial public offering ​in 2004.

Altogether, global capability centres and the IT sector employ up to 15 million people who anchor India’s middle class and whose jobs are under threat from generative AI, Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela said last week in an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Though this is a small fraction of India’s 616-million-strong workforce comprised mostly of swathes of informal and agricultural workers, the AI vulnerable cohort represents a sizeable chunk of the employed within the rising middle class. With fewer jobs, there will also be pressure on salaries for those who keep theirs.

For India, advances in generative AI are intensifying the intractable challenge of creating enough jobs in a country that skipped over the traditional manufacturing route and where 8 million people enter the workforce each year. Modi's push to drive manufacturing isn’t softening the blow much either, thanks to factory automation.

There are already signs that India’s world-beating 7.8% growth is decoupling from employment generation: New Delhi’s latest Economic Survey notes that since 2022 – the same year that OpenAI launched ChatGPT -- the labour intensity of output has marginally declined. That rupture will deepen unless workers upskill, the survey says, with the change coming “not in a single shock, but in a quiet, steady drift”.

This threatens a blow to spending on what people want, rather than what they need. Private consumption accounts for about 60% of GDP and the top 140 million Indians who on average each earn roughly $15,000 per annum, according to Blume Ventures, drive two-thirds of discretionary spending.

Any contraction in their incomes could force them to cut back, hitting sales of goods from new homes to cars and demand for experiences from dining out to live events. There will be a ripple effect too: Middle-class homes in India employ cooks, cleaners and drivers.

Demand for their services, and those of India’s vast gig economy servicing the middle class, would recede. That puts at risk earnings of carmakers, consumer groups and financial services providers which, together with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries RELI.NS – the owner of India’s largest retailer - account for nearly 62% of the benchmark Nifty 50 index .NSEI. Sluggish consumption is already hurting some of them: small car sales slowed at Maruti Suzuki India MRTI.NS last year and Unilever's ULVR.L Indian unit has been grappling with weak urban demand.

A potential 30% reduction in the 15-million-strong outsourcing and global capability centre workforce over the next two years could shrink the top consuming class by about 5 million to 135 million.

Assuming Blume Ventures' annual income estimate of $15,000, this cohort's total spending power stands to fall by roughly $75 billion a year, assuming those people don't find other employment or sources of income. That's equivalent to 10% of the Nifty 50 constituents’ net sales of 71.3 trillion rupees ($755 billion) for the financial year ended March 2025, per data from the National Stock Exchange.

Overall household savings are already declining as indebtedness mounts: Indians saved barely 23% of their personal disposable income in the financial year to March 2025, according to an estimate by CLSA, down from nearly 30% two decades earlier. Debt as a share of disposable income surged to 55% from 31% over the same period.

While India’s household debt to GDP ratio is much lower than for most peer economies, meagre earnings mean Indians end up spending 13% of their income on repaying borrowings, higher than 8.5% for China and 8% for the US.

Much of what Indians borrow goes towards financing consumption rather than creating assets. Households are leveraging up to pay for everything from overseas vacations to weddings and smartphone purchases.

Such financing, which the Reserve Bank of India calls non-housing retail loans, makes up 55% of household obligations and is growing faster than mortgages. India's household debt to GDP ratio stands at 41.9%. If half of those borrowings are consumption-linked, it implies household discretionary debt amounts to roughly 21% of GDP. Apply that to India’s nominal GDP of 331 trillion rupees for 2024-25 and you have at risk loans worth 69 trillion rupees across the country’s banks and non-bank lenders.

This threatens the loan quality at financial institutions led by the $130 billion HDFC Bank HDBK.NS as well as lenders backed by global investors from Sumitomo Mitsui Financial 8316.T to Blackstone BX.N who are accelerating their expansion in India to tap retail credit demand.

The impact of AI on the global workforce may ultimately create more jobs. First, though, it may turn India’s already weak consumption and much-vaunted demographic dividend into a nightmare.

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