The Maharashtra government told the Legislative Council on Tuesday that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) laid off 376 employees over two quarters of the current financial year from its Pune campuses, based on information provided by the company.
The disclosure was made during Question Hour after MLCs Uma Khapre, Praveen Darekar and Prasad Lad raised concerns about alleged retrenchments in the IT sector and sought clarification on reports claiming that as many as 30,000 TCS employees were being retrenched across Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar.
Labour Minister Aakash Fundkar said the data on 376 layoffs had been received directly from TCS. He also informed the House that the company employs 45,575 people across its Pune campuses. The minister said the retrenchments occurred over two quarterly periods of the current financial year.
However, the Forum for IT Employees (FITE), a group that advocates for IT employees’ welfare in Maharashtra, disputed the government’s figures, claiming the number of people pushed out in recent months was significantly higher. “The figure is completely wrong and false… It should not be 376 employees; the figure could be nearly 2,000 to 2,500 employees who have been laid off,” FITE chief Pavanjit Mane said, The Indian Express reported.
FITE argued that the government’s number reflected only formal terminations, while a much larger number of employees were allegedly forced to resign — what the group described as “silent layoffs”. Mane questioned TCS’s position that more than 2,000 employees had left voluntarily and said such exits should be examined separately from documented terminations.
The same report revealed that the forum said it has written to the state government demanding a thorough investigation into the alleged retrenchments and forced exits. It also cited TCS’s dividend payout for the last financial year while questioning why affected employees did not receive support that, according to FITE, had been promised.
In the Council, Fundkar said TCS had conveyed that the layoffs were confined to middle and senior managerial positions and clarified that the retrenchments were not linked to the use of artificial intelligence or automation.
The differing accounts have brought renewed attention to how job losses are classified and reported in large IT firms, with employee groups pressing the state to examine exits beyond formal layoffs.