Sometimes a piece of news comes from somewhere you don't expect, and it makes you stop and think.
China — yes, China — said something out loud last year that millions of Indian workers would give anything to hear from their own bosses. Their government basically told all companies operating there: you cannot use AI as a reason to fire employees. If AI replaces some part of someone's job, the company has to retrain that person and put them in a new role. You don't get to just send them home.
And it's not a polite request. In China, that's the law. Don't follow it and you lose your licence to do business.
Now compare that to what's been happening here.
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What the last year and a half looked like in India
It was bad. Let's not soften it.
Infosys stopped hiring freshers for stretches at a time. TCS, Wipro, HCL — thousands of people on the bench, sitting at home with no project, no clarity, just waiting. Some for six months, some for nearly a year.
Indian startups went on a layoff spree. Byju's. Paytm. Ola. Swiggy. Dozens of others you've heard of. Together, somewhere north of 60,000 people lost jobs between 2023 and 2025. The big foreign tech names — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta — cut teams worldwide and a meaningful chunk of those cuts were in India.
The freshers got hit hardest. The 2023 and 2024 batches from engineering colleges, including some NITs and good private institutes, had offers delayed by months. Some had offers cancelled outright. Imagine working through four years of college, getting the offer letter you'd been chasing, and then finding out over WhatsApp that the company isn't honouring it. That happened to a lot of people.
And the companies didn't even hide why. "AI helps us do more with fewer people" was a line you could hear in earnings calls. Said casually. No discomfort about it.
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So why did an authoritarian country handle this better?
Let me say the uncomfortable thing first. China didn't protect its workers because it cares about freedom or fairness. It did it because the Chinese government cannot afford a wave of unemployed people creating unrest. It's a calculation. A cold one.
But here's what matters — the worker who didn't get fired doesn't really care about the reason. They still have a salary. They still have a job. They still have something to come back to on Monday.
In India, that calculation was never made.
There was no policy from our government telling companies they owed their staff retraining. No guidelines. No safety net for people whose roles were eliminated because of AI. Companies were free to do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted to do was cut costs. So they did.
The companies answered to shareholders and quarterly earnings reports. Not to the workers whose lives were turned upside down overnight.
And our government — elected by those same workers — barely said a word about any of it.
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What this means if you're still studying
This is going to sound harsh, but it's better to hear it now than figure it out on your last day at a job.
The company you join in two years has no legal obligation to keep you if AI can do what you're doing. Your job security depends on one thing — how hard you are to replace. Nothing else matters.
So the question to ask about every course, every skill, every internship is not "will this get me hired." It's "will this still be useful when AI can do the basic version of this?"
Skills that need human judgment hold up much better than skills that follow a pattern. Things like understanding the situation, talking to clients, making calls when there's no clear right answer, taking responsibility when something breaks — those don't get automated easily. Doing the same thing the same way every day? That gets automated very easily.
Someone who only follows instructions can be replaced. Someone who understands why those instructions exist, and when it makes sense to ignore them, is much harder to let go of.
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Should India copy what China did?
Not really. China can enforce something like this because the government there has a kind of control over business that doesn't exist here, and frankly shouldn't. To do something equivalent in India you'd need actual legislation, debate, industry pushback, court cases — the whole democratic mess. It would take years and probably wouldn't fully work.
But India could do *something*. Companies that bring in AI could be made to put money into reskilling funds. Severance rules could be stronger when layoffs are AI-related. The government could fund retraining the way it funds highways. None of this is radical — versions of these policies already run in parts of Europe.
We just haven't bothered.
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Which means you're on your own
Don't wait for a policy to save you. It's not coming any time soon, and even if it eventually does, you'll be deep into your career by then.
Build skills that genuinely don't get automated. Learn enough about AI to manage it, check it, catch its mistakes — because the new safe jobs aren't in doing what AI does, they're in supervising what AI does.
Your career safety in India today is yours to build. Nobody else is doing it for you. That's unfair. It's also reality.
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