New Delhi | 8th Jul |
 |  Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla at a press conference. AFP ink slips are back in business. Deprived of the oxygen of capital and shackled by a hostile investment climate within the country, Indian businesses are being forced to sack employees in large numbers. It's the big, blue chip firms such as HSBC, Aditya Birla Group, Barclays India, Nokia and Future Group, and not just the exports driven sweatshops that are retrenching employees. Scores of other big companies would take a similar step in the next few months. HSBC, for instance, showed the door to about 750 employees in India. The bank sacked close to 200 employees, mostly mid-level managers, in Hyderabad and 350 in Pune. "We were called into a meeting, and out of the blue, were asked to choose between resignation and termination. We were gobsmacked," says an HSBC manager, who was a victim of its latest purge. The sacked employees were compensated with one month's salary for each year they had spent with the company, in addition to the mandatory three-months' termination salary. The firing operation at HSBC was codenamed "Nemo". It's a global exercise and the bank expects to save nearly $1 billion a year in manpower costs. "Sectors such as banking, IT and ITES, insurance and retail are drastically reducing their headcount," says Gurdeep Hora, managing director, Synergy Consultants, a Delhi-based recruitment consultancy. According to Hora, while downsizing hasn't yet started at large IT companies, top-tier firms have halved their recruitment targets. |
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