The head of India’s IT industry body has warned that artificial intelligence is eroding the entry-level work that has given millions of Indian engineering graduates their first jobs.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia published on November 6, Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar said AI tools are already handling much of the basic coding and software testing that companies once handed to freshers. He did not play down the risk. “From a fresher’s point of view, it is a concern,” he said.
Nambiar urged colleges to rework computer science courses quickly, warning that students could otherwise graduate with skills that are already out of date. He said the scale of change needed in the curriculum is greater than anything the sector has faced before.
A pipeline built on volume
The numbers explain the worry. India had 5,903 engineering and technology institutions in the financial year that ended in March 2026, with close to 2.6 million students enrolled. For decades, the country’s big IT services firms absorbed a large share of those graduates, training them in-house and placing them on testing, maintenance and support projects for overseas clients.
That model is under strain. Nasscom’s latest strategic review put direct tech employment at around 6 million for 2025-26, a net addition of about 135,000 jobs, or growth of roughly 2.3 percent. The largest employers are reporting slow growth: TCS posted sequential revenue growth of just 0.5 percent in the July-September quarter, and Infosys cut its revenue growth forecast for the current financial year to 1-2 percent. Both companies say their AI-related revenue is rising quickly, even as overall growth stays weak.
Nambiar pointed to areas where demand is still growing, including cybersecurity, AI consulting, and the work of putting AI systems into production and keeping them running. He described the current period as a rebalancing for an industry moving away from labour-heavy services, and said companies must be willing to disrupt their own businesses to come through it.
What it means for Bangladesh
Bangladesh’s software and IT-enabled services sector is far smaller than India’s, but it rests on a similar base: young graduates doing outsourced development, testing, data work and support for foreign clients, often at lower cost. If AI automates that layer of work in Bengaluru and Pune, it will do the same in Dhaka, and lower wages alone will not protect local firms.
That matters for the government’s target of one million digital jobs and for the universities that turn out computer science graduates every year. Courses that still focus on syntax and routine coding risk producing graduates whose first-job tasks are already being done by software. The more durable skills look like the ones Nambiar listed: security, systems integration, data, and the ability to apply AI to real problems in banking, garments, logistics and public services.
For students, the message from Nasscom is blunt but useful. Learning to work alongside AI tools, and building projects that show judgement rather than just code, is fast becoming the price of entry.
