Every year, India produces approximately 1.5 million engineering graduates and 600,000 MBA holders. A significant portion of them are trained for careers in IT services, back-office operations, financial analysis, and content creation — jobs that AI systems are now demonstrably performing faster, cheaper, and in many cases better.
This is not a prediction. It is already happening. Three of India’s largest IT service companies have disclosed in recent earnings calls that they are hiring 30-40% fewer entry-level graduates than they did in 2022, despite revenue growth.
The Education Gap
India’s engineering curricula, shaped by the outsourcing boom of the 1990s and 2000s, prepares students to do exactly the kind of structured, repetitive cognitive work that transformer models have automated. We are training an entire generation for jobs that no longer need them in the same numbers.
The solution is not to stop teaching engineering or management. It is to urgently redesign what those disciplines mean — emphasising judgment, creativity, cross-domain synthesis, and the ability to work with AI systems rather than compete against them.