The fallout of global uncertainty is visible everywhere. India’s benchmark Nifty index has dropped close to 15% since its September peak. Yes, one could call it a correction after a post-COVID surge that nearly doubled the index but that would  be missing the point. What India’s markets are going through is not just a dip; it is a crisis of confidence.

And by the looks of it that confidence is not coming back anytime soon.

To put it into perspective – The Indian stock market crashed on Tuesday, 3 June 2025, due to weak global cues and rising concerns over stretched valuations and foreign capital outflow. The Nifty 50 index closed 0.70 per cent lower at 24,542.50 points, compared to 24,716.60 points at the previous market session.

Mapping Global Uncertainty

Coming back to global ques – JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon at a summit in Washington, DC, summed up the collective corporate anxiety sweeping across the United States with a terse but telling line: “Uncertainty is not a good thing.”

He’s not wrong, for uncertainty, in many ways, is worse than a guaranteed disaster, because at least with disaster, you prepare. With uncertainty, you flail!

The Trump administration has set fire to whatever fragile fusebox was holding the US economy together. Inflation expectations are ballooning, economic indicators are flashing red, and financial markets are convulsing. President Trump, with characteristic nonchalance, has said he “wouldn’t rule out a little disturbance,” a casual understatement for what some economists warn could tip into a recession.

He has also dismissed the US market slide as “no big deal.”

Well, it is a big deal; the S&P 500 has tumbled 9% from its recent high, and big-name stocks – Nvidia, Tesla – have taken bruising hits. But the bigger red flags lie beyond Wall Street: in plummeting consumer sentiment, wavering inflation expectations, sudden tariff threats hurled at Canada, Mexico, China, and of course, in the budget cuts and layoffs by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Ironically, there’s been little to no public discourse around what actually matters to US voters – like the price of eggs, milk, and groceries that have crept dangerously high.

CEOs across the US are rattled, investment houses are trying (desperately) to reassure markets, and economic policy flip-flops have turned the global economy into a chaotic chessboard. Since February, nearly $4 trillion has been wiped off the US stock market.

Back home, India hasn’t exactly been in a celebratory mood either. Until just last month, Indian stocks were clocking their worst performance in nearly three decades. The broader midcap index has plunged close to 20%, and $1 trillion in market value has been erased. For a country that leaned on the stock market as a post-pandemic wealth engine, that’s a brutal blow.

But let us be clear – this is not just about markets. It’s about the fractures beneath them. The world is being forced to bunker down, and India needs to do the same. The problem is we are heading into this storm with an economy that’s already limping.

Inflation, after running riot for several quarters, is just now beginning to show signs of cooling. But the correction may be too little, too late. India’s post-pandemic recovery has been K-shaped at best, with wealth accumulating at the top and stagnation for the rest. Middle-class families (once India’s growth powerhouse) are watching their budgets erode under the weight of high household costs and stagnant incomes. The indicators are everywhere: two-wheeler and entry-level car sales are falling again, suggesting that India’s mass-market consumer is in no position to splurge.

Jobs are scarce. Savings are thinner. And a silent retreat from retail investing has begun.

A case in point is the story around SIPs (Systematic Investment Plans) that became a financial lifeline post-COVID. Since September last year, monthly contributions are falling. Investors are pulling out, or just not putting in new money. For many families, the stock market was the only cushion when real income growth disappeared. Hence, that cushion is deflating.

Add to that the revisions in India’s GDP expectations. While the RBI clings to its 6.7% growth estimate, more grounded projections hover closer to 6% and that too, without factoring in a potential collapse in global demand. If both engines of growth (external demand and internal consumption) sputter, we may be in for far more turbulence than anticipated.

And that brings us back to uncertainty – the one constant in this volatile equation. In an age of ‘on-again, off-again’ trade spats, economic flip-flops, and a shaky foundation of domestic growth, the real question is – which countries will survive the global whiplash intact, and which ones will emerge battered?

India may look to rural demand, or the modest tax giveaways from the last budget, for relief. But the timing couldn’t be worse for a convergence of internal economic stresses and external shocks.

India’s Biggest Problem, The Golden Era That Isn’t

It was meant to be the dawn of a “golden era” for India’s youth. In her interim budget speech earlier this year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman laid out a shiny Rs 1 trillion corpus to push innovation in sunrise sectors – startups, AI, deep tech, and R&D. The messaging –  if you are young and tech-savvy, your time is now.

Only, it does not feel like that, especially, if you are a fresh engineering graduate hunting for a job in 2025.

The harsh truth is, the tech job market is in a deep freeze. India’s prized IT sector, the same one that rebounded so strongly after COVID, is witnessing a brutal drought. What job portals once referred to as a slowdown has now turned into a full-fledged collapse at the entry level. Two years in a row, industry giants like Infosys and TCS have opted out of campus hiring.

The result is a talent glut. Generations of freshly minted engineers, hopeful and hungry, are entering an industry that is not hiring.

And it is not just new jobs; even people already in the sector are not leaving, which is compounding the problem. Attrition rates in IT/ITES fell from 27% in 2022 to somewhere around 16–19% in 2023. That sounds like stability, but in context, it’s a red flag – it means no new roles, no backfilling, no growth.

In fact, the outlook has gotten worse. Specialist staffing firm Xpheno warned of a 40–50% drop in hiring last year, and they’ve since downgraded that prediction to a full-blown freeze for entry-level roles. Startups, once the pressure-release valve for tech hiring, are also gasping. Job portal data shows a 78% decline in software job postings and a 73% fall for startups over the last two years.

If we zoom out: 2023 saw gross hiring additions in IT collapse to just 14%, down from 40% in Q1 of 2022. The Naukri JobSpeak Index reported a 16% drop in white-collar hiring year-on-year in December 2023, and the tech sector led the nosedive with a 21% fall. Even month-on-month, it was down another 4%.

So yes, fewer jobs than last year and they are still falling.

So What has gone wrong?

The IT sector, like it or not, is globally tied at the hip; when the world sneezes, Indian tech catches pneumonia. It is a highly cyclical beast – first to feel the global pain, and usually late to benefit from any uptick. But this time, it was not just cyclical – it was brutal.

And when the Big Three – TCS, Infosys, HCL – released their Q2 FY’24 results, they were quietly culling their employee base. Shrinking headcounts, no campus hiring, and explicit guidance from firms like Infosys that they’ll stay out of the college recruitment circuit “to improve utilisation”.

Meanwhile, analysts and global brokerages, just a year ago, were still bullish on billion-dollar deals, calling themselves “believers” in Indian IT. Their optimism hinged on the industry’s ability to secure massive cost-saving contracts, where firms cut costs for global clients while improving delivery.

But here is the catch –  these deals do not need armies of coders they need fewer, smarter, higher-skilled people. And that’s the big shift. The traditional pyramid model bulk hiring at the bottom, feeding into mid- and senior roles is getting flattened.

India’s so-called golden era might still arrive. But first, the tech sector—and the government—have to reckon with a sobering reality: the jobs that powered India’s middle class dreams are no longer guaranteed.

The new sunrise sectors may well shine but only if we ensure the young have more than just sunlight. They need a path, a paycheck, and a plan.

By January 2024, the brokerage wrote that IT services were seeing an up-cycle following a challenging year of decline in tech spending. And even though the IT services market had a widening “leaders” and “laggards” group, large-cap IT services had been winning billion-dollar deals, so things looked fairly rosy.

However, the very next month, in February 2024 the same brokerage house took note of global IT major Cognizant’s “underwhelming” growth guidance and said this was a reflection of an uncertain demand environment, especially in the large cluster of rate sensitive sectors, capital markets, and insurance companies.

HSBC estimates that India needs 70 million jobs over the next decade. Against a figure like that, the fact that thousands of job openings are now sucked out from a fairly narrow organised job market pool has very serious consequences for an extremely fragile employment landscape.

The Last Bit

Global Uncertainty is here knocking on our doors. Thanks to Trump’s on and off Trade Policies causing chain reactions in every sector, global economy.

AI is another dragon raising its digital head – there is neither any joy nor glory in pointing to the serious problems a growing jobs crisis can lead to.