NASSCOM

NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies) is India's principal IT industry trade body, founded in 1988 and headquartered in New Delhi. It represents more than 3,000 member companies spanning services, products, and start-ups, and publishes the definitive annual employment and revenue figures for India's technology sector. Government ministries, foreign investors, and multinational human-resources teams use NASSCOM data as the benchmark measure of the Indian IT labour market.

In its FY2026 annual report, NASSCOM recorded Indian IT sector employment of approximately 5.9 million, reflecting net additions of roughly 140,000 during the year. At the same time it reported that the legacy top-five outsourcers trimmed headcount and that entry-level IT hiring fell 20 to 25% year on year. The report named JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Walmart and Shell among the firms expanding in-house Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, even as several confirmed AI-driven US cuts in the same period.

NASSCOM's data sits at the intersection of two competing narratives in 2026. The aggregate employment figure of 5.9 million is cited as evidence India's IT sector is still growing; the concurrent fall in entry-level hiring and legacy outsourcer headcount is cited as evidence the character of that growth has changed, shifting from volume IT labour to specialised capability work concentrated in GCCs. For US and European policymakers measuring AI-driven displacement, NASSCOM's data captures a channel, offshore corporate relocation, that neither the WARN Act nor the JOLTS survey records.