Posted on 05/27/2026 7:41:19 AM PDT by Cronos
On a warm night last May, Nikhil Somwanshi sent his roommate a WhatsApp message asking him to tell his family that what was about to happen next was an accident.
The message triggered a frantic search for the 24-year-old machine-learning engineer in southeast Bengaluru
Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. 9mths earlier he’d landed a coveted job at Ola Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup worth $1 billion.
Getting a job at Krutrim was a big deal for Somwanshi and his community. Banners went up in his village, congratulating him. He sent funds from his first paycheck to his parents, who built a small temple on their land in gratitude for their son’s good fortune. His salary of 3.7 million rupees ($41,000) was nearly 10 times what his family earned from farming.
But something has gone awry in the industry Somwanshi was entering. 83% of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Bengaluru, tech workers account for a starkly disproportionate 20% of patients seeking transplants due to organ failure, according to a leading regional newspaper. A study of tech employees in the IT hub of Hyderabad found that 84% had a liver disease linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress.
Some of India’s tech leaders, meanwhile, are advocating 70-hour and even 90-hour workweeks, instead of the national legal maximum of 48.
Tech workers paint a picture of mounting anxiety. From junior software engineers to senior project managers, workers at firms across the industry were buckling under the burden of deadlines. They had little time for themselves or their families, and worried about layoffs. Most said they feared conditions would only worsen with the rise of AI.
(Excerpt) Read more at restofworld.org ...
What’s going to happen to all the Indians here in the US when they get laid off?
Hint: They ain’t going back to India.
Founded by Bhavish Aggarwal, one of India’s top entrepreneurs, Krutrim was positioned as India’s answer to ChatGPT. Aggarwal has pushed an intense work ethic within the company. He derided work-life balance as “a Western cultural import” and advocated for a 70-hour workweek.
....
Narayana Murthy, the billionaire co-founder of the IT titan Infosys, has called for a 70-hour workweek. SN Subrahmanyan, chairperson of the multinational L&T, has pushed for 90.
...
Another engineer at a firm in Bengaluru also reported grueling hours. “At times, I have [gone to sleep] at 6:30 a.m. after working through the night and reported back at 10:30 a.m.,” he said. He has suffered from low blood pressure and been diagnosed with a fatty liver disease. He comes from a small village and sends money home monthly to help his parents. “This model isn’t sustainable,” he said. “It is exploitative, and drives workers towards breakdown.”
We hope.
Yeah. I’ve never met an Indian who worked more than a couple of hours without sleeping at his desk or in the bathroom stall. Laziest bunch of stankasses ever.
> SN Subrahmanyan, chairperson of the multinational L&T, has pushed for 90. <
The “great philanthropist” Andrew Carnegie set a 72-hour workweek for the laborers in his mills. No days off. No day of rest.
When it comes to heartlessness, it looks like this Subrahmanyan guy has Carnegie beat.
I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with many Indian H-1B professionals over many years and they are smart, dedicated and always polite and helpful.
I would be supportive of Chinese employees also, if they weren’t all CCP spies.
Its not their fault we have so many corrupt leaders ruling in Babylon.
Make Babylon the Great Again.
India has over 1 billion people. It has a huge resource of highly intelligent, clever people. The jolt to the tech industry by evolving AI will cause temporary disruptions to the Indian economy and to many of those highly intelligent people. The same thing has happened to America and continues to happen. This is the way of a dynamic world. In the long run, despite a very bumpy road, India will do well.
India will do well.
What do you base that on?
“running water” & “deodorant” are foreign concepts to most Indians. Most are quite familiar with cheating and corner-cutting though.
Probably historical reasoning.
India was pretty wealthy as a continent until about 1800
The Brits took care of that.
Have you ever been to India for any length of time? I have had to unfortunately for work and it’s nothing like that.
Wow --> According to one 2024 report, only 10% of India’s 1.5 million engineering graduates that year were likely to secure a job. Tech workers are facing “a huge uncertainty about their jobs,” Mukhopadhyay said. “And they are very stressed.”
Ten percent! How disheartening to go to school, earn a difficult and demanding degree, and then find there are 10X more people in your field than industry needs.
Where’s the concern over all the Americans who lost their jobs for the last 30 years because of these pajeets?
Boo-frickin-hooo. Zero shits to give.
Just wait until they all go on welfare.
Pretty sad he died that way. As long as you are alive, there is always hope. I feel for his family.
$2.5 Trillion in yearly deficits pays for a lot of woke, blue-city, urban welfare.
Hell, its what keeps the Democrat party alive.
As an owner of an IT consulting company, we do not hire H1B or even green card holders. US citizens only. The acculturated ones work just as hard as any native-born US citizen. The others are pretty useless drones. They did a study in India, and only 25% of Indians actually want to be in tech; let that sink in. They do it, because they have to. They pack in apartments, 3 to a bedroom, in cities like D.C and Chicago, and goldbrick and bullshit their way in, depressing our tech wages. It’s the big consulting firms, billing at $250 per hour and paying them $40, they f up most projects, and the clients then rinse and repeat, with another consulting firm. It’s madness really. It’s actually, want great out of the box tech minds next to Americans, hire Eastern European.
The world needs ditch diggers too.
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