‘White collar pay is breaking’: Saurabh Mukherjea sounds alarm for India’s center class
India’s white-collar center class is below rising financial pressure, as AI-led job cuts, stagnant salaries, and collapsing consumption hit company income and family budgets alike, warns Marcellus Funding Managers founder Saurabh Mukherjea.
In a weblog , Mukherjea laid naked the financial squeeze going through India’s center class. Since Diwali 2023, India’s company earnings progress has slumped, dragged down by a pointy slowdown in consumption, which makes up 60% of GDP.
On the coronary heart of the consumption disaster is a stark actuality: job creation for white-collar staff has decelerated, and actual wages have stagnated.
“The job market is struggling each from a post-COVID hiring binge and the extra everlasting impression of AI changing human roles,” Mukherjea writes.
In the course of the pandemic, firms rushed to rent. Indian IT corporations alone added practically 800,000 staff between 2020 and 2022, betting on a long-term digital growth. However demand cooled in 2024, triggering mass layoffs—even at giants like Google, Microsoft, and TCS. Now, as Mukherjea notes, even financially flush corporations are shedding workers.
What’s extra worrying is the structural shift: AI is automating even advanced workplace duties. Google has admitted bots now deal with 1 / 4 of its coding. Marcellus itself has discovered that AI analysis rivals the work of seasoned analysts.
Mukherjea cites a seminal 2003 paper by economists Richard Murnane, David Autor, and Frank Levy, who warned that automation would erode middle-class jobs—particularly these involving routine or non-cognitive expertise.
“Their insights, although US-focused, now apply to Indian white-collar staff too,” he says.
This disruption is displaying up starkly in paychecks. Evaluation of India’s 50 largest listed firms reveals that common salaries have did not sustain with inflation since FY16. Center-class staff relying solely on wage hikes are dropping floor even in opposition to primary residing prices like meals.
India’s largest employers are pivoting quick. In July 2025, TCS CEO Ok Krithivasan stated the agency will lower its workforce by 2%, citing large-scale AI adoption. HCL Tech’s CEO C Vijayakumar went additional, pledging to double income with half the headcount.
The center class, as soon as the engine of India’s consumption story, now finds itself on the sharp finish of an AI-powered realignment—incomes much less, saving nothing, and spending cautiously.
