Tech trouble: how AI-led job insecurity is driving poor mental health among India’s IT and tech workers

Bhavana Sharma, a 36-year-old software engineer, dreaded logging on to her work computer in the morning. A high performer who was always sharp, motivated and engaged, she now sounded flat, cynical or gave off an air of having ‘checked out’. She recounts finding herself feeling weirdly numb about projects she used to care about. Like many of her colleagues, she assumed this simply meant she needed a vacation, a better work calendar system or fewer meetings. But sometimes, these negative feelings and moods indicate something more serious.

“A mental vacation from my busy job will work wonders,” thought Sharma, before taking a two-week-long vacation. Travelling solo, she spent the first week feeling irritated and vaguely panicked. When she returned to work, she felt just as depleted as before.

Following a consultation with a clinical psychologist, Sharma found out she was in fact experiencing symptoms of ‘burnout’ – generally defined as a ‘state of physical and emotional exhaustion’. 

“I was still functioning well on the outside,” she recalls. “I was responding, presenting, solving, managing and doing almost everything my role required, but inside I felt emotionally hollowed out. I was struggling to feel like myself. That disconnect continued for a long time before I realised what was happening.”

Sharma is not alone. Commentators say there are mounting signs of mental and physical strain among information technology (IT) professionals employed by Indian businesses. They argue that performance pressure at work, long working hours, increasing competition between tech businesses fighting for market share, growing concern about redundancies, and worries about job stability across the IT and tech industries are creating an environment where workers feel constantly under stress and reported cases of ‘burnout’ are rising.

‘Epidemic’ of burnout 
Several surveys have exposed an ‘epidemic’ of burnout fuelled by overwork, toxic workplace expectations and an ‘always-on’ culture, say employment relations and worker wellbeing specialists.

A 2025 survey conducted by Blind, a professional community app, revealed a stark picture of India’s tech sector being plagued by instances of overwork and employee burnout. The survey, carried out from 12–19 March 2025,among 1,450 verified IT professionals, showed that 72% of respondents reported routinely exceeding the legal maximum 48-hour working week limit. One in four professionals logs 70 or more hours weekly, contributing to an alarming burnout rate of 83%. The issue is most acute in companies where extreme working hours are standard, say the researchers.

Furthermore, 68% of professionals confessed they felt obliged to respond to work messages outside of office hours, suggesting a growing business culture of employees being expected to be available around-the-clock.

Another report by Great Place to Work, a consultancy that provides certification services for businesses wishing to demonstrate a positive workplace culture, found that 29% of IT professionals in India experienced burnout in 2024, and 20% were uncertain about the stability of their jobs – another indicator of waning confidence in long-term career viability, according to a news report by India Today.

Mental health experts are now voicing concerns about how this continuous pressure is affecting employees across the wider tech sector and tech startup businesses. They warn that continuous workplace pressure means the brain remains in a state of constant alertness or hyperarousal, which literally means the body is always in ‘stress mode’, even when there is no immediate threat.

Rise in stress and burnout cases 
Dr Chandil Gunashekar, a Bengaluru-based general physician, reported seeing a 30% rise in stress and burnout cases among the city’s IT and startup professionals over the past five years, according to a report by the Deccan Herald. “Until around 2020, most people [in the IT and startup sectors] worked fixed hours. Today, late evenings and night calls are common in tech-based roles,” he said.

Analysis published in 2021 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that long working hours – defined as more than 55 hours per week – led to 745,000 deaths worldwide from stroke and heart disease in 2016.

It concluded that working 55 hours or more a week increased the risk of dying of heart disease by 17% compared to working 35-40 hours, and raised the risk of a stroke by 35%.

Studies have shown that as people work longer hours, productivity initially increases – but once a threshold is reached it starts to decline as physical and mental exhaustion sets in. The ‘sweet spot’ is widely recognised to be around 40 hours per week, according to many health and productivity experts.

However, with job losses rising across the technology sector, employees like Sharma feel pressurised to embrace long hours with no or little work-life balance to increase their chances of retaining their positions.

On 31 March 2026, it was reported that over 10,000 Oracle employees in India and an estimated 30,000 globally are at threat of losing their jobs. According to the Bloomberg news service, the US-headquartered company, which had a directly employed workforce of over 160,000 as of May 2025, plans to cut thousands of jobs as part of efforts to deal with financial pressures brought on by its huge investments in artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. At least some of the job cuts will involve removing roles the company expects it will need less of due to the growth in AI, according to the news report.

Closer to home, India’s largest IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced in July 2025 that it planned to reduce its workforce by 2% during the 2026 financial year, with middle and senior management positions thought to be those most at risk. Meanwhile, in February 2025, Infosys, another major Indian IT company, terminated the contract of hundreds of trainees on its Mysuru campus. According to news reports, Infosys terminated the contracts of trainees who had failed three attempts at internal competency and performance assessments. 

The company defended its decision, stating that performance evaluations were a key component of its globally recognised training framework. Karnataka’s Labour Department subsequently launched an investigation into the layoffs, but concluded that Infosys had not violated any labour laws as there was no employer-employee relationship between the dismissed trainees and Infosys. The impacted youngsters were, according to the Labour Department, only apprenticeship trainees and could not be called employees of the company, according to a report by The Economic Times.

Meanwhile, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech and Tech Mahindra have all but frozen net hiring, adding just 17 employees collectively during the first nine months of the 2026 financial year as AI adoption and weak demand for tech services affect recruitment needs. The data, reported by The Economic Times, shows a dramatic contrast with the same period last year, when the top five firms added 17,764 employees.

Recruitment slowdown
To understand how the IT and tech sector has reached a situation where recruitment has slowed to a trickle and fears are rising about major job losses, it is important to revisit the origins of India’s software industry, and how the sector was shaped by an earlier moment of global technological panic.

India’s software revolution was born out of the so-called ‘Y2K’ challenge. Although the Y2K bug is now seen as a bit of a joke, in December 1999, the world prepared for the predicted impending global meltdown of millions of computers when their internal clocks tried to roll over on 1 January 2000, because they were not designed to handle that new date.

At the time, it was feared that the bug would crash computer systems across the world. It all stemmed from a seemingly small software glitch: in the original code written for computers through the 1960s, programmers used a two-digit code for the year, instead of the now-standard four-digit one. The practice, which began as a means of saving memory space, was predicted to lead to systems crashing when 1 January 2000 dawned.

At the time, the only country that had enough software programmers to adjust all these computers so they wouldn’t go into fault mode, and was willing to undertake the task at a reasonable price, was India. Hyderabad provided skilled programmers for the tedious task of trawling through millions of lines of computer code to correct the fault. 

“Y2K has been a godsend [for IT companies and jobs in India],” Rusi Brij, a vice-president of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, told The UK Guardian at the time. Satyam had pioneered methods of debugging the affected computers. It was this huge operation that launched the IT outsourcing industry in India, where Indian tech businesses obtain IT work from companies and countries around the world.

Since then, the Indian software industry has generated millions of white-collar jobs, creating a new middle class pushed by high ambition and strong purchasing power. This, in turn, has increased demand for apartments, cars and restaurants across top-tier cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram over the past 30 years.

Persistent and intensifying stress 
For many tech professionals, mental stress and anxiety linked to work pressures and worries is persistent and intensifying, as the general economic downturn in recent years, business closures and the growing risk of IT skills becoming obsolete increasingly threaten the tech sector and the jobs and livelihoods of those it employs.

According to software lobbying group Nasscom, India’s tech workforce consists of over 5.43 million professionals, yet only 0.09% of the country’s 1.1 million registered tech companies have implemented a formal employee assistance programme to support general worker health and mental wellbeing. 

A Delphi-validated thematic study in 2025 investigated the psychological impact of AI-driven job displacement among Indian IT professionals. The analysis, which specifically explored how individuals psychologically experience the loss of job roles due to automation, and how these experiences influence individuals’ emotional, cognitive and behavioural wellbeing, identified six overlapping core psychological themes. The study reported that the themes – emotional shock, erosion of professional identity, chronic anxiety and anticipatory rumination, social withdrawal, adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, and perceived organisational betrayal – reflect a multi-layered resource loss, including identity, control, employability and social belonging.

The study concluded: “AI-driven role redundancy in the Indian IT sector is more than a labour market shift a deep psychological disruption. This study underscores the urgent need for organisations, mental health practitioners, and policymakers to develop anticipatory and compassionate interventions that can buffer the mental health consequences of technological transformation.”

For workers like Sharma, however, the challenge is not simply navigating technological change but finding ways to remain healthy within it.

Sharma’s clinical psychologist recommended she undergo burnout therapy. After a few rounds of the therapy,

Sharma said that the therapy does not make her care less about her work. “It helps my system stop paying such a high price for it,” she said.