We, the "laptop class", are facing our biggest-ever crisis. Now, what do I mean by the "laptop class"?
People like you and me, whose work is mostly done on laptops. White-collar professionals who don’t produce anything directly. We plan, organise, supervise, market, and sell. We do that routine mental labour that, until very recently, used to be essential for running businesses.
Now, that work is getting automated at an alarming pace.
For decades, we have been the backbone of the middle class, the bulwark of the economy, driving much of India’s consumer revolution. Today, our size is shrinking as white-collar job opportunities have stopped growing. And even where there are openings, the pay has become dismally low.
This is happening as we add millions of new graduates to the workforce every year, each wanting a “respectable” white-collar job. But all they are being offered as freshers is what a quick service delivery agent might earn in a month.
Fresh Graduates, Limited Jobs
Think of the typical trajectory of a young middle-class person, starting their journey into adulthood, into the world of responsibilities.
A graduate degree is an absolute must for any middle-class youngster today. One cannot expect to get a good job without that. And it’s not just the middle class. Even those who are aspiring to break into the middle class from below know they have to spend and send their kids to college for them to have a better life.
So, we keep adding millions of graduates to the workforce every year.
According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE)’s estimates, a whopping 33 million graduates have been added to India’s workforce in the past three years—21 million of them in the past one year alone.
Now, CMIE’s data also tells us that India has about 110 million salaried workers. Out of this, 18-19 percent are salaried professionals or make up the “laptop class.”
That means there are only about 20 million people in India with professional white-collar jobs that command decent middle-class salaries.
Now, out of the 21 million new graduates added to the workforce over the past year, even if 20 percent were to look for professional employment, we would need four million additional professional jobs this year alone to accommodate them.
Remember, there are only 20 million professional salaried jobs in India. So, adding four million would require a 20 percent increase in such jobs.
But what is the real situation? Naukri’s Jobspeak Index, widely recognised as India’s most robust indicator of new white-collar jobs, shows a 9 percent decline in new job openings in October 2025 compared to what it was last October.
Now, hiring is usually seasonal. It rises ahead of the festival season and then falls immediately after that. So, to get rid of this seasonal fluctuation, I am going to take a four-month moving average of Naukri’s index.
This means that at every point, I will compare four-month periods. That comparison shows that white-collar job openings improved by just three percent in the four months ending October 2025 compared to the same period last year. Remember, we needed at least a 20 percent rise—but got only 3 percent.
The global recruitment firm Indeed’s data on formal white-collar jobs in India is much worse. Indeed says formal job openings in October 2025 were down 20 percent compared to October last year. This is the seventh month in a row that Indeed’s data has shown a decline in formal job openings in India.
No wonder, therefore, that the number of unemployed graduates in India has shot up by more than two million in the past one year. And even those who are lucky enough to get jobs are being offered extremely low salaries.
IT, Banking Sectors No Longer Safe Bets
The worst-hit sectors, ironically, are IT and finance, which are the most popular among students looking to graduate with professional degrees.
IT, as is well known now, is a declining sector when it comes to middle-class jobs. Entry-level salaries here have been stuck in the Rs 20,000-30,000 per month range since 2015. Mid-rung salaries for people with five to eight years of experience haven’t budged either, especially after the mass layoffs of middle managers in India’s biggest IT companies. No one would dare to ask for a raise in this kind of environment.
Salaries in banks and other financial institutions have also stagnated for the past couple of years. Most employers in the financial sector now offer packages with a very low base pay and a high variable pay component. You get most of your salary at the end of the year, and that too depends on how your boss has rated your performance.
This has resulted in a large number of financial sector employees feeling disgruntled by year-end, and they end up switching to another employer. In many cases, they go without any significant increase in pay. They accept a similar total package as long as their fixed pay component is increased.
This is why there is a continuous churn of employees in the banking and financial sector. One report says that the attrition rate is so high in this sector that each position has to be filled more than once every year. This would be very unlikely if employees were happy with their salaries, because studies show most people don’t move unless they are offered significantly higher pay—a kind of offer they can’t refuse.
A Changing Job Market
The biggest salaries are being offered to people with demonstrable skills in AI and machine learning.
Along with that, senior managers who work in strategy and business development are also being hired at very high salaries as corporates try to move away from old business practices and pivot into the new AI age.
There is a third trend that is beginning to emerge: remote jobs in small towns. Many companies are finding that it is cheaper to hire a techie who works from home, living in a tier II or tier III town, than recruiting someone in a metro or a big city. So many IT graduates are now going back to their hometowns and working from home while living with their parents. This has profound sociological and economic ramifications for small-town India. It opens up the possibility of the emergence of a small-town middle class with lower aspirations than their counterparts in India’s metros.
Watch the full video to know more.
(The author was Senior Managing Editor, NDTV India & NDTV Profit. He tweets @Aunindyo2023.)