The slowdown in India’s IT sector has begun reflecting in employee salaries.

Infosys and Wipro have reported drops in their crorepati employees, or employees whose salaries are more than Rs. 1 crore per year. Infosys had 123 employees earning more than Rs. 1 crore in FY23, but this number fell to 103 in FY24, representing a 16 percent drop. Similarly at Wipro, 92 employees had a salary of more than Rs. 1 crore in FY23, but that number is down to 81 now, which is a fall of 12 percent.

Interestingly, Infosys didn’t directly hire a single employee with a salary of more than Rs. 1 crore last year. This was the first such instance since FY17, when the company hadn’t hired any employees with more than Rs. 1 crore salaries either. Wipro, however, onboarded eight employees with salaries of Rs 1 crore or more throughout in FY24, but presumably saw the departure of 19 employees making more than Rs. 1 crore, which meant it ended up with 11 fewer crorepati employees than before.

India’s top 4 IT firms trimmed their employee headcounts by over 50,000 last year. The biggest fall was seen at Infosys, which saw a headcount reduction of 24,182 employees. It was followed by Wipro, which saw a headcount reduction of 18,510 employees and TCS, which ended up with 10,669 fewer employees. Many IT firms hadn’t visited college campuses for placements either last year.

All this has been attributed to a slowdown in the IT sector. All Indian IT companies have seen a significant slowdown in their revenue growth in FY24 — for instance, in FY23, Infosys’ revenue had grown by 15.4 percent, which fell to 1.4 percent in FY24. Also, these companies had over-hired in 2022 — at a rate nearly 5x of the average of the last 10 years — and this has meant that they don’t need as many employees amid slowing growth. And to make matters worse, IT companies have been given muted growth guidelines for next year. And a result, IT companies seem to be less willing to have crorepati employees on their payrolls than before.