Wipro, India’s third largest software exporter, has sacked around 500 employees as part of its appraisal process, people in the know said.
The IT major’s move to weed out “non-performers” has come at a time when the technology services industry is struggling to battle the twin challenges of automation and protectionism in its main markets.
In the existing tight job market, Indian IT firms have already reduced campus hiring and moved workers whose roles were marginalised owing to automation in different projects.
While Wipro did not specify the exact number of affected employees, the company said it “undertakes a rigorous performance appraisal process on a regular basis to align its workforce with the business objectives, strategic priorities of the organisation, and requirements of our clients”.
“This systematic and comprehensive performance evaluation process triggers a series of actions, such as mentoring, retraining and up-skilling. The performance appraisal may also lead to the separation of some employees from the company and these numbers vary from year to year,” it said.
At the end of December, Wipro had 1,79,129 employees.
Wipro’s cross-town rival Infosys said it had reduced its hiring by as much as 60 per cent as it deployed more automation to do repetitive tasks being done by engineers. Infosys added 6,320 people in 2016-17, as against 17,857 in the previous year.
In January, Wipro chief executive officer Abidali Neemuchwala had said the company had redeployed 4,500 people, released due to automation in the first nine months of 2016-17, on other projects.
