TCS Cuts 12,000 Jobs, Spends Over Rs 1,100 Crore on Severance Payouts

Pune, 9th October 2025: India’s largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has come under scrutiny after revealing that it spent ₹1,135 crore on layoffs and restructuring during the second quarter of FY26. The company’s consolidated net profit dropped to ₹12,075 crore, while its Q2 revenue stood at ₹65,799 crore, slightly below market expectations.

According to the company’s filing with the stock exchanges, around 12,000 employees, or about 2% of its total workforce, were laid off during the financial year. TCS stated that the expenses were primarily related to severance packages and restructuring costs.

However, employee unions and several insiders have challenged the company’s claims, alleging that the actual number of job cuts is much higher. They have accused the IT major of pressuring employees to resign voluntarily to keep the official layoff figures low.

A TCS spokesperson denied these allegations, asserting that the restructuring affected only a small portion of the workforce. The company, which employs over 6 lakh people globally, remains India’s largest private-sector employer.

According to TCS’s official financial disclosure, the company’s headcount stood at 593,314 employees in Q2 FY26, compared to 613,069 in Q1 FY26 — a net reduction of 19,755 employees in just one quarter. The figures indicate a gap of nearly 8,000 employees compared to the 12,000 layoffs officially acknowledged by the company, raising questions over transparency in reporting.

Reacting to the development, Harpreet Singh Saluja, President of the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), strongly criticized the company’s actions.

“TCS may present these job cuts as numbers on a balance sheet, but for us they are stories of shattered lives. Employees who gave 10–15 years of loyalty are being cornered and discarded overnight. This is not restructuring — this is corporate cruelty,” Saluja said, calling the layoffs “a betrayal of the workforce that built TCS’s empire.”

Saluja further alleged that the company’s lower attrition rate — which dropped from 13.8% to 13.3% — indicates that the exits were management-driven rather than voluntary, and called for greater regulatory scrutiny of the IT giant’s employment practices.