IT industry to hire 2 lakh people in near term

The information technology sector will continue to grow as well as generate jobs and will hire two lakh people in the “near term” despite challenges, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has said.

The IT industry would grow secularly because investments in digitisation and technology would continue over the next several years, Gopalakrishnan, the chairman of Axilor Ventures, said during the inaugural session of the Bengaluru Tech Summit on November 16.

While there might be ups and downs because the industry followed the global economy, it would be a short-term phenomenon, said Gopalakrishnan, who is also the chairman of the Karnataka government’s Vision Group on IT.

“There are challenges…about coming back to the campus, coming back to office, issues related to attrition, moonlighting, etc., but I am confident in saying that the industry will face these challenges and will continue to grow, the industry will continue to recruit and in the near term, I see industry recruiting at least two lakh people,” he said.

Gopalakrishnan added that the industry was expected to grow at 8-10 percent and that, too, on a base of $220 billion, which was not a small growth.

Digitisation accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. “The Indian IT services companies and the global development centres in India demonstrated that they have the resilience to withstand any shock and they came out with flying colours.

“This increased the trust of global businesses and multinational corporations in Indian IT services,” he said.

The march of technology would continue with AI/ML, cloud, IoT Web 3, blockchain, NFT and metaverse and the industry would continue to grow, the Axilor Ventures chairman said.

The industry would also have to address the issue of data privacy and protection and batted for publicly shared databases for startups, entrepreneurs and research scientists to spur innovation and entrepreneurship.

“It’s a very exciting period for the IT industry. I believe that the next 25 years are going to be even better than the last 25,” he said.

Speaking about Karnataka’s “Beyond Bengaluru” programme, he said IT services companies were setting up smaller centres in cities like Mysuru, Mangaluru, Hubballi-Dharwad and Belgaum so that employees could be closer to home and leverage technology remotely. Moneycontrol