IT, financial services account half of jobs among listed companies

MUMBAI: Even as the government pushes the ‘Make in India’ initiative to develop manufacturing in the country, IT & financial services have turned out to be the biggest employers — both account for half of the jobs among all listed companies. Incidentally, these two sectors are also the biggest hirers of women.

A study of the top 250 listed companies by investment bank CLSA has shown that of the total 45 lakh jobs generated by them, more than half were in just the two sectors, with financials employing 28% of the total workforce, or 13 lakh people, and IT another 26%. Within financials, the public sector employs 60% of the workforce.

Private firms continue to be the main source of job-creation, as public-sector headcount declined 2.6% in FY19. Private-sector headcount, on the other hand, increased by 9.2%. The decline in public-sector jobs was the sharpest seen in recent years. The two biggest listed public-sector employers — Coal India and State Bank of India (SBI) — on a net basis, cut their workforces year-on-year (YoY) by 4.4% and 2.6% respectively.


In the report ‘Boardroom nectar — Distilling the essence of India’s annual reports’ by Mahesh Nandurkar and Abhinav Sinha, job growth among listed companies in FY19 was 4.1% YoY for a comparable set of 238 companies, rising from 1.4% growth in FY18. This was a three-year high. “If we add the three large outsourcing job service providers, then the growth rises to 6%. In absolute terms, nearly 0.25 million net jobs were created during the year,” the report said.

At almost 420,000 employees, Tata Consultancy Services has the largest workforce of all the listed companies in India. TCS has employed the largest number of women — at 152,114 female employees — accounting for 36% of their workforce. Infosys has the highest proportion of women in their workforce, at 37%. The biggest hiring increase was by Quess Corp, which hired 56,300 employees in the last year.

Public sector companies have shrunk their workforce for the second consecutive year, which is largely through attrition as there has not been any major separation scheme. One outcome of this attrition is that the average age is coming down. “Punjab National Bank (PNB) has been working to bring down the average age of the organisation. Over FY14-19, PNB’s average employee age fell from 46 to 40, which should help deal with digitalisation of the financial industry,” the report said

Meanwhile, leading IT company Infosys has seen an ongoing decline in its share of employees below the age of 30. This is partly on account of weaker top line growth and partly as a result of hiring more experienced staff.