Rest of World reports:

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, the city of 13 million known as India’s Silicon Valley.

Somwanshi was a star student from a small village in the farm-dotted countryside. Nine months prior, he’d landed a coveted job at Krutrim, an artificial intelligence startup worth $1 billion. He was among the ranks of India’s globally renowned tech industry, which is estimated to be worth around $280 billion and employs more than 5 million people. The industry runs the spectrum from top-end firms like Krutrim to massive consulting and outsourcing companies.

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. Eighty-three percent of India’s tech workers suffer from burnout, according to one recent survey. One in four clocks over 70 hours a week. In Karnataka state, home to 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 told Rest of World they 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.

The fate of India’s tech workers may foreshadow the future of a global workforce reckoning with the advent of AI. For decades, the country’s massive pool of outsourced tech workers have helped power global tech giants — the U.S. accounts for 62% of India’s IT outsourcing revenue. As employees worry that AI will threaten their jobs and demands for efficiency rise, an industry long known for 24/7 schedules and intense workloads is reaching a breaking point. [Continue reading…]