Industry lobby Nasscom on Tuesday said the problem of attrition afflicting the Indian IT sector may have hit its peak. Its vice chairman Krishnan Ramanujam said if one looks at the data from the top-10 IT companies for the December quarter announced recently, attrition levels seem to be plateauing if not trending down.

“Maybe there is hope that we are at the peak and hopefully it will get better from here on,” Ramanujam, who serves as the president and head of business and technology services at the largest IT exporter, TCS, told reporters at Nasscom’s strategic review press conference. It can be noted that many companies have reported over 20 per cent attrition in the recent quarters, ever since the greater demand for digitization from companies across the world, after the pandemic increased the demand for skilled manpower which can deliver projects.

Companies have hired more people than planned, given out retention bonuses or increments, promoted or trained the staff and taken a slew of other HR initiatives to retain people, which has impacted profit margins. It can be noted that the higher demand for IT services globally has seen the IT industry post a 15.5 per cent growth – the highest in over a decade – to be a USD 227 billion sector, which employs over 50 lakh people.

The lobby grouping’s president Debjani Ghosh said in a survey of over 100 tech company CEOs which the body did recently, attrition has been flagged as one of the key challenges and the problem will not get solved till the gap between supply and demand is bridged.Listing out a slew of measures being undertaken by the companies and also Nasscom, Ghosh said talent retention is a “key success imperative” for the industry and also for India.She said companies are spreading out to smaller towns and cities, adding more women, fresh graduates and training in order to retain the talent.

Seeking to make a point that the industry as a whole is not losing people, Ramanujam stressed that it is not so that IT industry hands are switching to others but it is a case where it is attracting people from other industries.The need right now is to widen the funnel of talent attraction, wherein people from other industries can come to the IT sector, he stressed.