On 15 August 1947, India became free. We pushed out the British, raised our own flag, wrote our own constitution. We became a democracy. A country where every person, on paper, had rights.
That was 78 years ago.
Now look around. It's a Sunday in 2026. Some Indian techie is sitting in front of his laptop in Bengaluru because his manager pinged him at 9 AM saying there's an "urgent call" — for a company whose headquarters is somewhere in California or London. He's doing roughly the same work as a guy in those offices. The other guy earns four times what he earns. And the other guy is definitely not on a call right now, because it's Saturday night where he is.
Nobody puts it this way out loud, but the question won't go away — did we actually get free, or did we just swap one ruler for another?
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Let's talk about the salary gap
An engineer at a major tech company in the US — Google, Microsoft, Meta, doesn't matter — earns somewhere between ₹1 crore and ₹1.7 crore a year. An engineer at the same company, doing roughly the same kind of work, sitting in Hyderabad or Bengaluru, earns between ₹10 and ₹25 lakh.
Same company. Same product. Same deadlines. Often the same manager.
Different city. Very different paycheck.
The corporate term for this is "geographic pay bands." What it actually means is your work is worth less because of where you were born. That's the whole reasoning, dressed up in HR vocabulary.
And don't think this is just tech. The same thing plays out in finance, design, marketing, operations — anywhere Indians do work for companies headquartered abroad. The pattern is consistent enough that the people setting these salaries don't even pretend it's anything else anymore.
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They didn't come here to help us
When a big multinational opens its India office, you'd think the prime minister himself had won an award. Thousands of jobs. Massive investment. Politicians on stage. Newspapers writing glowing pieces.
What doesn't get said in any of this — the company came here because it can pay Indians 70 to 80 percent less than what it pays back home. Same skills, much cheaper. That's the entire decision.
The "investment" is mostly a cost-saving move with good PR attached. The profits generated by all that hard work in Bengaluru and Hyderabad and Pune mostly flow back to a headquarters somewhere abroad. The value gets created here. The value doesn't really stay here.
We've seen something like this before. The East India Company also said it was just here to do business.
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The Sunday meeting
You know this scene. Anyone who's worked in an Indian IT firm or a foreign MNC's India office knows it.
It's Sunday. Maybe there's a family function. Maybe a wedding you actually wanted to attend. Or maybe nothing — maybe you just wanted to sleep until 10 for once. Your phone buzzes.
*"Hey, can you join a quick call at 11? Something urgent came up."*
Quick is going to mean ninety minutes minimum. Urgent will turn out to be a deadline everyone has known about for two weeks but somehow only became urgent now. And "can you" — that's not actually a question. You and your manager both know it.
You've seen what happens to the people who say no too many times. They get quietly removed from the next big project. Their appraisal mentions things like "attitude issues" or "not a team player." And then when the company decides to do its annual round of "rationalisation," somehow their name keeps coming up.
So you open the laptop. You miss lunch. You spend Sunday afternoon working on something that's going to be forgotten by Wednesday anyway.
Monday morning you come in and pretend it's a normal week. So does everyone else who was on the call.
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The sentence nobody actually says
*"If you can't, that's fine. There'll just be... consequences."*
Nobody says it like this. Almost nobody says it directly at all. But it's in the air, in every conversation about workload, every discussion about working hours, every meeting where someone tries to push back.
It works because it's real. India has way too many people looking for jobs and not enough good ones. The threat isn't a bluff. Companies know this. Some of them use it as their primary management approach.
The result — people just stop pushing back.
You don't ask why your colleague in the US office earns four times what you do. You don't bring up that your offer letter said 40 hours and you're regularly hitting 60. You don't say working on a Sunday is not normal and shouldn't be normal.
Because the cost of speaking up feels too high.
The British used to call this "docility" in their Indian workforce. Today companies put it on their careers page and call it "ownership mindset" or "culture fit."
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We can vote, but we can't say no to a Sunday call
India is a democracy. We vote. Governments rise and fall on those votes. Courts work. Free speech, free press, all of it.
And then we go to the office.
At the office, none of that applies. You can't vote on your working hours. You don't get to pick your manager. You have no real say in the policies that decide how your week looks. The company sends an email. You either go along with it or you start updating your CV.
Most people go along with it. Because the next company is usually running the same playbook anyway.
We have rights as citizens. Inside the office, those rights mostly stop existing.
And the politicians who turn up at every ribbon-cutting when a foreign company opens an India office — they almost never ask the obvious question. What are these companies actually paying? How many of these "employees" are on calls every Sunday?
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Why this keeps happening
I should be fair. Not every foreign company is awful to its Indian staff. Some pay decently. Some have genuinely good cultures. The problem isn't every company — it's just enough of them that the pattern is real.
So why does it keep going?
The first reason is simple — there are too many of us. India puts out roughly 1.5 million engineering graduates every year. Only a fraction land genuinely good jobs. When the supply of candidates is this huge, companies don't have to try. They know if you walk away, ten more people are applying for the same role tomorrow.
The second reason is that our labour laws look strict on paper but nobody enforces them in IT or services. Working hour limits exist. Sunday work is technically restricted. None of it gets checked. There's no government inspector counting how many days in a row you've worked.
Third — there are no unions in Indian IT. Zero. Every employee negotiates alone, in private, with no collective leverage. One person pushing back is easy to handle. Ten thousand people pushing back together would actually shift things. That second one never happens.
And finally, the social side. In a lot of Indian families, having a job at a big foreign MNC is still treated like an achievement, no matter what it costs you. Complaining about your job comes across as ungrateful. So people post the company logo on LinkedIn, smile in photos, and don't say much else.
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A few things that actually help
If you're about to start your career, here's what I'd tell a younger sibling.
The company that hires you will try to pay you as little as you'll take and use as much of your time as you'll give. That's not personal — that's just the default setting of the system. Your job is to know what you're actually worth and not let yourself get talked down from it.
Build skills that are hard to find. The rarer your specific expertise, the more leverage you have. Not just on salary, but on how the company treats you. Generic skills get you generic treatment.
Get things in writing. The offer letter, the promises during interviews, the working hour expectations, the bonus structure. If it's not on paper, assume it doesn't exist. That promise about "we mostly stick to 9-to-6 here" — written down, or it's nothing.
Save money fast. The number one reason people put up with bad situations is they can't afford to walk away. Even a basic emergency fund of a few months changes how you feel sitting in your manager's office.
Talk to other people in your field. Online communities, peer groups, colleagues you actually trust. Find places where people share real numbers — actual salaries, actual hours, actual company cultures. That information is more useful than any certification you'll ever do.
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What independence is supposed to mean
India's economy has genuinely grown. More people are out of poverty. The middle class is bigger than ever. Opportunities exist now that didn't exist a generation ago. All of that is real and worth acknowledging.
But economic growth and fair treatment are not the same thing.
A country that spent 200 years being exploited should be a little quicker to recognise it when it shows up again — even when this version comes with a glass office in Whitefield and a company laptop you can take home.
Independence should mean you can leave work when your shift is over. That your Sunday belongs to you. That the value your work creates doesn't all flow back to a head office somewhere abroad while you sit awake worrying about your appraisal.
That version of independence — we're still fighting for it. Just much more quietly. One person at a time, deciding to set a boundary, deciding to ask the question, deciding to push back.
The people who'll actually change anything are the ones who eventually stop pretending it's all fine.
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