March 18, 2026 • 34 mins
India’s tech industry was supposed to be a ticket to the middle class, a way out of poverty. Instead, for many workers, it’s become something else: long hours, intense competition, and a growing mental health crisis. Dexter talks to journalist Parth MN about the mounting pressure inside India’s tech workforce, the rise in suicides among engineers, and how a system built for relentless growth leaves little room for failure.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
- Parth’s article, “Death of an Indian tech worker” - https://restofworld.org/2026/india-tech-workers-crisis-suicide/
- VICE’s video, “ The Women Behind the Indian Farmers Protest” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knMUaiBiw4U
- kill switch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@killswitch_pod
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hey, it's Dexter. Before we get in today's episode, just
the heads up that we're going to be talking about suicide.
So if that's not something you're comfortable hearing about, no worries,
and we'll catch on the next one.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Nikol was a star student. His parents are farmers and
comes from a humble family. In fact, when he landed
a job at Ula Crutrem, which is a high profile
AI company, banners went up in his village because nobody
had gone as far as he had in that village,
you know. But then he started working at the company
(00:42):
and he realized that the work culture is not what
he expected.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Part MN is an independent journalist who recently wrote a
piece for the publication Rest of World and the title
of that article is death of an Indian tech Worker.
It's about Nicol Simwanci, a twenty four year old machine
learning engineer in Bangalore, a city that some people were
nicknamed India's Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
His family members told me that he had started working
fifteen hours a day. His manager was kind of abrasive,
which was not something he was used to. He was
a very soft spoken, polite sort of a guy. When
he had come home for a couple of weeks he
had met his close friend. They caught up and he
basically told him that he's feeling a little lonely in
Bangalore and he was considering a move back. But his
(01:28):
family and the friend I spoke to said that it
was not easy for him to come back and just
abandon the job that had brought so much pride to
his parents. Right, it would have spread a bit of
negativity around him in the village, and he would have
thought that I've made my parents proud. I can't just
leave that and come back. And one evening he sent
(01:50):
a message to his roommate which tell my family it
was an accident. A few hours later, his body was
found in a lake in Bangalore.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell my family that it was an accident. Yeah, Nicol
was someone that people looked up to. This is a
young man from a tiny village who got out and
got himself a job at a respected, big company. What
happened to him there is a really long story and
a really sad story, but it's not a unique story.
(02:22):
Cross reporting shows that there is an increasing trend of
people leaving poor upbringings only to go die in the
big city, and the connection is India's tech industry from
Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I'm all right.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
India has always had a suicide problem. In fact, that
suicide rate is more than the global rate. But some
of the suicides that have happened in India are largely
suicides of farmers.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
India's farmers have been in international news for the past
few years. Back in twenty twenty, farmers and unions representing
over two hundred and fifty million people staged the largest
protest in recorded human history. You might have seen some
of the footage of this. Farmers driving tractors from northern
India down to Delhi demonstrating against proposed laws that they
said would make it impossible for them to make a living.
(03:51):
More than half of India's population relies on agriculture for
the livelihood, and things have gotten so bad economically that
people are getting desperate. Part has been reporting on this
topic for over a decade.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Farmers have been dying by suicide, especially since the nineteen nineties,
in huge numbers. I mean, between nineteen ninety five twenty fifteen,
more than three hundred thousand farmers have died by suicide
in India. The Indian government has stopped counting, like tide
data fudging of farmer suicides because the numbers started looking
really bad, but the trend has only worsened.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Stopped counting.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, they're bearing bodies in other columns basically, so there
are certain states that will show no farm suicides, but
certainly other suicides quote unquote, other suicides would have shot
through the roof. But the farmers are not the only
profession that is struggling right now. It's also pilled over
into the white collar jobs.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Part reporting takes him to rural villages across India, talking
to people who live there about the pressures they're dealing
with that lead to this increase in suicides. But recently
he's been noticing another trend outside of the villages and
instead in the big cities, specifically in these tech hubs
Bangalore and Hyderobar. Or rather, he's been noticing the same
(05:05):
trend just in a different demographic suicides among white collar
tech workers.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Over the past few years. As someone who follows news
in India, you keep coming across stories of tech workers
few sides, and these are isolated suicides and then there
are maybe Twitter threads and Twitter hashtags that follow for
a couple of days, and then it goes quiet for
a few more days until there's another suicide. So we've
(05:31):
been seeing quite a few of them over the past
few years. In fact, when we analyzed the newspaper reports,
we found there were two hundred and twenty seven techworkers
suicides in the last eight or nine years, and that's
a fairly big number. India doesn't maintain data for it
worker suicides specifically, but the last recorded number for white
(05:53):
collar workers was ten percent of the suicides that have
happened in India for years.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
In the tech industry has been thought of as a
path out of the village, getting out of the farming village,
going to a big city, getting in the tech industry.
That's the dream for a lot of people, and for
a poor person, a tech job in Bangalore could lift
your entire family out of poverty. But Paths Reporting is
finding that instead these workers are essentially going to the
(06:20):
big cities and dying there.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Some of the stories that you come across in newspapers,
you see tech worker suicides in say it, hubs of
Bangalore or Pune or Hyderabad, but when you look at
some of the people who have died by suicides, they
are not from Bangalore or Hyderabad. They come from marginalized families,
farming families, you know, working class families, and they are
(06:45):
sort of looking to, you know, uplift themselves and their families,
bring their families out of financial trouble and basically breaking
their back over it.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
For Nichols Sawacci, this was the game plan since he
was a young boy. His family did everything they could
to get Nico educated so that he could have opportunities
that they never had.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
His parents had to sell a portion of their farmland
and their house to get his son and his elder
sister educated. In fact, when he was nine years old
or ten years old, his father enrolled him in a
school which was forty minutes away from his village because
it was an English medium instruction village, and that's something
(07:27):
that they wanted him to study in and cultivate naturally
if he had to go out and do something that
they couldn't do. So his parents worked really hard, very
humble family. He worked really hard to get where he
had gotten.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
When Nico landed a job at an Ai infrastructure company
called Ola cruture. It was a really big deal. He'd
made it. What does it mean for a kid from
a rural village to go out and make it in
a place like Bangalore and.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
It's a huge deal.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
His first salary was ten times more than what his
parents earned from farming, so you can imagine what a
huge deal it was for his parents. And villages are
generally a tight knit community, so when someone from the
village does well, the entire village sort of.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Celebrates, and he does mean celebrating. People back home in
nichols village put up banners all over town to show
how proud of him they were. But less than a
year later, Nichol would take his own life. Not even
the police seem to have any real answers. But the
story of Nichol's death shows us a lot about India's
tech industry and about how people in other countries, including
(08:36):
the United States, are influencing that toxic work culture that's
after the break. What is the work culture like right
now in the tech industry in India?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
It's quite toxic.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Having spoken to a bunch of it professionals, eighty three
percent of them say they've burnt out and one in
four like twenty five clock seventy hours a week, which
is a lot. And even then you have some titans
of the industry saying there should be atrs and ninety
hours work week.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
This is a trend amongst tech companies in India. The
founder of one company says that he expects a seventy
hour work week. The chairman of another says he wants
ninety hour work weeks. The founder of the company that
Nickel worked for refers to the concept of work life
balance as a Western import.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
I don't agree with this work life balance concept. I
think that's an outcome of again a Western thought process,
of a post industrial, of of the industrial era. But
our interesting ari thoughts was never that.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That's bubbish Augerwald, the CEO of OLA, on a podcast
in the summer of twenty twenty four. On that same show,
he said, quote, I have a strong belief that one
generation will have to do penance so that we can
build the number one country in the world, the largest economy.
End quote.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I mean, one tech worker told me that he's worked
through the night at some point in his job, got
home at six thirty and still reported back at ten thirty. Jeez,
there was one tech worker who told me that these
long guards make sure that he has very little time
for his family, his health. He started seeing a psychologist
because he's no longer in the right ream of mind.
(10:20):
One tech worker told me that there's obviously regular unpaid
overtime that they.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Have to do.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
And beyond the stress in psychological pressure, this culture is
also having physical effects on the workers. In Karnataka, that's
the state in India that's home to Bangalore.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India and
in Karnataka, you have a lot of patients looking for
organ donations and organ transplants, and a lot of them
are tech workers. In the ita Ab of Hyderabad, there
was a survey and study which came out recently. It
said that about eighty four percent of tech workers struggled
(10:56):
with atty liver disease, which is associated with stress and
long eay of sedentary work. They're overworked, they're overwhelmed, and
they have very little time for themselves and their families.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
For someone like Nikos Suwanci, the stresses of his new
job were on top of the fact that he was
already living in a place that was culturally and even
linguistically different from where he grew up.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
In his village, he spoke Marati, which is his native
language his mother tongue, something I speak as well. In Bangalore,
nobody speaks Marati. He had to have been engaging with
people in English, something that he was fine with because
he had learned in an English medium school. But still
that change matters, and when you don't have anybody around you,
(11:40):
it becomes difficult to settle down in an unfamiliar territory
right and at a time like that, when you have
a workplace that kind of toxic and abrasive, it makes
it even more difficult.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
But according to Part's conversation with family and friends, Nico
never let it show he knew people back home were
depending on him.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
I think one of the biggest things is the responsibility
right because parents, even though it even the parents or
families may not say that to their kids that we
are looking at you for financial security, the kids are
mature enough to understand that their parents are not earning
a lot of money. The kids are mature enough to
understand that the parents have sacrificed a lot to make
(12:23):
sure that they get educated. And so there's a lot
of pressure to succeed, and it is not easy. In
a country like India, which is inherently a labor surplus economy.
There are far too many people and far too few jobs,
and so when you land a job, it becomes very
difficult to walk away from it because you don't know
what the future holds. Right and someone like Nikol, who
(12:45):
came from the family that you did, who came from
the village of North mara Astra and did not have
financial security, we would have felt that pressure ten times
more than like someone like I would have felt, who
was born and praised in Mumbai. And I don't have
the kind of financial responsibilities that Nikl has, so I
can maybe take a lot more chances, and Nikkeil couldn't
(13:08):
afford to take any chances.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Part has come across a lot of stories like this,
highly educated college graduates who get stuck in a toxic
work environment but feel like they can't leave because they
have to provide for their family back home, or increasingly,
people who can't find work at all because there are
too many people competing for too few jobs.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I read a recent report in Economic Times which said
that in this current financial year, the top five it
companies in India have added a net seventeen employees one
to seven employees, whereas last year it was seventeen thousand.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
So there's a hiring freeze as well.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I'm sorry, can you say that number again? You said
one seven?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yes, top art firms added just seventeen stuff in nine
months and hiring has nearly.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Frozen seven seventeen across all those companies.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
This is an Economic Times report I have in front
of me right now. And I met a family of
a twenty year audio old tech graduate who was looking
for a job, who had been looking for a job
for months. He had made his CV again. Came from
a small town. His father had passed away. His mother
and his grandmother had taught him up by running an
(14:24):
iron shop. They would press people's clothes and work as
domestic help, and that's how they raised this boy. He
would have also felt the responsibility to bring his mother
and mother some sort of financial stability. He was one
of the brighter students, but he couldn't get a job
for months. He ran from one place to another, asked
(14:45):
a lot of people about it. Eventually he also died
by suicide. And I met his mother. I met his
elder brother, and his elder brother told me that I'm
not as intelligent as in and we all thought that
he would go places, and now we may same all
the time, because he ended his life abruptly out of
depression and just feeling worthless because he was worth so
(15:09):
much and he wasn't getting anything. And his mother made
a very heartbreaking point when I spoke to her, she
said that I regret making sure that my son got
educated because if he had not studied, he wouldn't have
had those ambitions.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And because he couldn't complete those ambitions, he ended up
dying by suicide. There are so many people out there
who are not educated. They work as laborers. They make
ten thousand rupeza a month, five thousand rupie a month, wow,
and they don't have the ambition of working in a
big office. And he had the ambition because he knew
he was worth a lot more. And because he couldn't
(15:44):
he fell short of that ambition. He went into depression
and ended up killing himself. And it was one of
the most heartbreaking conversations I've had as a reporter.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
This wasn't always the case. From the nineties to the
early two thousands, tech employees were in demand in big
cities like Bangalore and Hyderobar and the jobs would good jobs,
fair hours, good salaries, and a chance to build a
good life for yourself.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
They could work eight hours, help their families, give them time,
build a house, pace of family, and still make a
decent living. That is no longer possible. Twenty ten eleven onwards,
it started getting increasingly competitive. There's this one ceo I
spoke to. He said that in the early two thousands,
(16:32):
the tech industry was growing at a scorching pace. As
the industry got more and more competitive, companies started making
more and more competitive demands. And then that sort of
changed the nature of the industry. And over the past
I think five years, especially six years, especially since the pandemic,
that work culture has become even more toxic. Work from
(16:52):
home lurned, the boundaries between personal space and office hours,
and workers became answerable sort of.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
The main driver of the Indian tech economy is outsourced work.
At one point this meant call centers. Now it's morphed
into housing specialists for all kinds of technology needs. This
kind of work already requires Indian companies to provide services
around the clock in order to service the rest of
the world, and the companies pass those twenty four hour
obligations onto their employees. So this culture is encouraged by
(17:27):
the CEOs of some of these companies, But the pressure
that turns the gears of that culture machine isn't just
coming from the few executives. It's coming from outside. To
be more specific, it's also coming from the United States.
I think a lot of people say from the States
when they think of the tech industry in India. I
(17:48):
think they think of a couple of things. The first
would be outsourcing, or they would think of call centers.
I think another thing that people might think of is
people who immigrate from India and work in Silicon Valley.
But your reporting is showing that that's also changing and
putting a lot of pressure on workers also, Right, So the.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Are three things you just alluded to.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
One is the call centers, which are getting more and
more automated because of AA, so a lot of those
jobs have gone away. Secondly, outsourcing, which is the backbone
of India's tech industry. I think around sixty two percent
of India's tech revenue is driven by US. Outsourcing remains
India's backbone and that is why experts have told me
(18:31):
that IT remains more vulnerable to AI disruption. Traditional product
development companies won't be as affected as much as traditional
outsourcing companies. So a lot of these jobs are endangered,
and many of the workers also see it coming. One
IT worker basically told me that a lot of the
mid level managers are being laid off and when that happens,
(18:51):
they are not being replaced. Their work invariably falls on
employees below there. And the last thing you spoke about
is the immigrant population in the US, and that is
the Donnertrump hiking fees recently and the entire campaign at
an make America Great Again and anti magadation sort of campaign, as.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
A president signing a proclamation that now requires this one
hundred thousand dollars annual fee for this H one B
visa for highly skilled foreign workers. Now, this could be
a huge blow to big tech firms that rely heavily
on highly skilled forward workers to fill key roles.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Historically, the H one B visa program had been a
path for Indian tech workers to move to the US,
and it was a win win. Immigrant workers get a
high paying American job and their employers the US tech
companies really liked having this extra source of foreign talent.
But now the Trump administration has astronomically raised the fees
for those visas and American companies can't afford to hire
(19:50):
them anymore. So a lot of Indian workers who otherwise
might have gone to the US are staying in India
and they're competing for the very few jobs that are
available at home. They're getting thrown back into that pressure
cooker where the work culture is terrible, the hours are extreme,
and the jobs that are available are on the AI
shopping plot. Basically, the tech workforce in India is being
(20:12):
squeezed from every side.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And if somebody pushes back, they are basically told to
fit the job and they can be easily replaced by
somebody else because there are hundreds of people waiting in
the wings. So that's the situation of tech workers in India.
They're sort of trapped. They have nowhere else to go.
And when the alls are stacked so much against you,
you can't really push for better conditions. You can't really
(20:36):
push back for paid over time and so on and
so forth, because the companies clearly hold all the chips.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
After the break India's union leaders get into the streets
to fight back against the tech industry. But will it work.
What are employees even able to do in these situations?
Because it's sounds like, even just from reading your articles,
so many people are anonymous. Is it that people are
(21:05):
afraid to speak up?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Absolutely, most of the employees are afraid to speak up.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
There. They are scared for their jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Because if they are cooted in my piece and their
employee reads it, they're done. Not only will they lose
their job from that employer, they will not get a
job anywhere in the industry. Other employers will also find
excuses to not employ those people. So they are petrified.
They have very few legal protections. The cases basically drag
(21:37):
on for years, so by the time you get any
kind of justice, decades have passed, and so there's very
little one can do. So a lot of people flatly
refuse to speak to me, and the ones who agreed,
I had to go through some people who already knew me,
and they could sort of assure them that this person
is a llegitimate, credible journalist who won't disclose your identity,
(21:59):
and that's when they agree to speak to me. Even
the cases of suicides. A lot of family members were
reluctant to speak to me because many union leaders told
me that they're afraid. Many of them basically sign non
disclosure agreements with the companies. Many of them get paid
by the companies through a life insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
According to union leaders, these companies will use corporate insurance
policies to compensate the families of the suicide victims. The
compensation comes with a catch.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
And then they're also worried about defamation, that the company
might drag them to court, and they don't want to
get into that, and they don't have the power to
sort of take on a company. So many of the
families who had lost their loved ones to suicide dude
toxic culture. They didn't come forward and speak to me.
Even Nichol's family, his parents didn't speak to me about
(22:48):
the companies. They said, we don't want to talk about
the company. We want to we only speak to you
on condition that we speak about my son and I'd
like to remember him. His parents basically said, we don't
want to talk about the company, and that basically tells
you how and why these huge multinational companies have been
able to get away with this kind of toxic work culture.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
In response to Nichol's death, Oha, the company released the
statement saying that they were quote deeply saddened with each death.
Companies put out similar statements, but not all workers are
keeping quiet about this. Last year, about seven hundred tech
workers staged protests in the streets of Bangalore. One of
their demands was that labor laws actually be enforced. This
(23:31):
is bold and we got to acknowledge that. But part
says that we have to keep that protest in perspective.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
They do protests, they have taken the streets, but the
IT industry employs around five million people in India and
some thirty thousand are part of the unions. So they
are doing what they can in their own way in
their own city.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Five million versus thirty thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, so you know, thirty thousand people who are part
of these unions, it's not a large number. And then
they cannot pressurize the employers to make changes in the
way they work.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, I mean that's not even one percent.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, So the union leaders that I spoke to, they
are doing their best to mobilize, They're doing their best
to pressurize state governments into bringing some change, But because
the numbers are lacking, they're not able to put the
kind of pressure. And obviously the labor laws in India
are easily bypassed. The labor codes in India are not
(24:33):
very pro worker, so they are sort of squeezed from
every direction.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So how do these companies respond.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
The company that I've reported on refused to comment. There
was another case that I have reference to. They didn't
want to comment on that either. I reached out to NASCOM,
which is India's top IT body, which represents the IT
company's interests. They gave the statement about AI and how
they see reshaping jobs and so on and so forth,
but they didn't speak about the allegations of toxic work culture.
(25:05):
They refuse to speak about the suicides. Whenever a suicide happens,
they released a sort of the usual statement about being
saddened by the loss and that we are cooperating with
the authorities and we're helping the family, and we're doing
our best to create a healthy workplace for our employees
and so on and so forth. So they release that
(25:25):
customary statement and.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
That's about it.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
When I spoke to some of the union leaders, they
made a good point. They said that even the police
and the lawyer out of machinery is unable or unwilling
to bring these companies to book because the state is
then losing revenue if the company moves to another state.
So a lot of the state government authorities they are
also unwilling to take on the large companies whenever a
(25:52):
suicide happens.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So it is very easy.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
For the authorities to say that it could have been personal.
But the fact of them is, if work culture is
contributing to that stress, then it deserves to be investigated.
Nobody is saying that it was the only cause for
suit sides. Whenever take dies by suicide. Surely there could
be personal reasons, but if a toxic work culture, if
(26:16):
that work stress is contributing, is a contributing factor, then
it deserves to be investigated.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
When I first read parts article, in addition to being
shocked at all the horrible details, I was also kind
of ashamed that I didn't know about this thing that
probably everyone in India is talking about. Right well, I
actually know. Part says that a lot of people in
India don't necessarily realize how widespread this is. It's not
that people don't care, or that the public isn't paying attention.
(26:43):
It's that there are important details that the news isn't
usually telling them.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
There was one thing that I found while reporting this
story was that when I looked at the that's by
suicide the it workers, most of the news reports did
not mention the company they worked in. And that's so telling.
It's one of the basic things that you have to
do as a reporter, as a newspaper. You when you
mentioned someone has died by suicide in one company in
(27:10):
one city, why can't you mention the.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Name of that company?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
And many of those right, and the name of that
company because it would invite bad press, because it would
invite bad reputation. The name of that company is invisibilized
in many of these news reports. And then when I
had to dig further, I had to call the union
leaders and then I had to ask them, you know,
this is a report I found, but I don't know
what company they were working in. Then they sort of,
(27:35):
you know, call them, call their contacts, and they found
out which company the suicide happened in.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
I mean, this is something you want to know as
a potential worker. If I'm applying to someone. I'm finding
out that this is happening to the workers. There's probably
something wrong at that company. I want to know.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
That exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Many of these news reports do not mention the company,
and that just.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Tells you how even the media is.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Not entirely pro worker, and how they are sort of
trying to protect the employers. And it's actually not a
surprise when you look at the way the lawyer and
auder machinery operates, when you look at the way the
media operates, it is not a surprise that the tech
companies are able to get away with this toxic work culture.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
This phrase or the idea that one generation has to
pay a penance for India to become the number one
country in the world or for India to move forward.
This is something we've seen before, right, the kind of
work culture that people talk about in Korea, the kind
of work culture that people talk about in Japan. Sometimes
(28:44):
the kind of work culture that people talk about it
in China. Sometimes, you know, I think a lot of
times we make this mistake of thinking, oh, there must
be something ingrained in the cultural values. It's rapid economic development,
which is the underlying pattern here. It's very strange to
see the idea of penance being introduced and that hey,
(29:05):
we're just going to have to pay the price for
a generation. Okay, who is we?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Exactly, when you talk about rapid economic development.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
You have to ask whose development right? Right?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Because the person calling for penance has a network of
over a billion dollars and the people who are supposed
to be paying that penance are dying by susid they're
struggling to make the rent. And there's something that I've
always wondered when we talk about this rising GDP of
(29:38):
India and India becoming the third largest or fourth largest
economy and we're adding more and more billionaires, but at
the same time, sixty three million people enter poverty because
they don't have access to in public healthcare. There was
a study recently that was quite quite revealing even the
top five percent of income earners in Mumbai would need
(29:59):
us to agering one hundred and nine years to afford
a home. Even globally, house price to income ratio of
three x to six x is considered healthy, and anything
about ten x is typically flagged as sort of it's
a warning sign because it's unaffordable and by that sort
of metric. Indian metros are horrible. The HPI ratio in
Mumbai is thirty four x, in Bangalore is twenty two x.
(30:22):
And education has gotten more and more expensive. Healthcare has
gotten more and more expensive. So even if from the
outside it looks like you're making a decent sort of income,
you're still living paycheck to paycheck. You can say that,
of course, India has become the fourth largest economy, but
what about the per capita income? What is happening? If
the top one percent owns forty percent of the country's wealth,
(30:44):
then of course a GDP might look like it is.
India is the fourth largest economy in the world. But
the fact of the matter is people are struggling to
pay their rent and ninety percent of people are making
less than three hundred dollars a month. So when you
talk about rapid economic develop it is generally the development
of the developed and not the development of the working
(31:05):
class and the poor and the marginalized.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
What you're describing here is I think something that a
lot of listeners will know something about. Cost rising isn't
anything that's foreign, But you're describing a much more extreme
version of this, and you're describing it in a region
where a lot of people depend on Yeah, because of
exactly what you're talking about. You're talking about outsourcing, You're
talking about how much of the world actually does depend
(31:31):
on labor in the tech sector that is happening in India,
and they may not realize how precarious that is.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I hope this story becomes a bit of a reality
check for the global tech industry, which India is an
integral part of. I want to make sure that the
tech industry, which is sort of you know, it's worth
two eighty billion dollars, it employs five million people, and
it's got these glittering numbers, there has to be some
reality check. There has to be some sense of, you know,
(32:06):
that facade has to.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Has to be broken.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
What I got from reading parts reporting and from talking
to him is that maybe sometimes when I read about
explosive growth in some market overseas, so maybe stop and
ask questions about who's back That growth is built on
valuations and stock prices and market ratios can only tell
you so much under all those numbers. Or people like
(32:33):
Nicol and his family.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I met his family. They were completely shattered. His father
was in tears. His mother had stopped eating, she had
become frail. She had to go to the hospital a
couple of times. It was a very heartbreaking situation when
I interviewed them. When I met them, his father in
fact told me that there's a photograph of Nikkel in
their house and they've put up sort of a blanket
(33:01):
on top of that photograph because when they see him,
they miss him, so they can't even bear to see
his face on that photograph without really breaking down.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or on Instagram. We're at kill switch pod. And if
you find this stuff interesting or valuable, you know, maybe
leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast.
It helps other people find the show, which helps us
keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did
(33:39):
you know that kill Switch is on YouTube and link
for that and everything else you need to know is
in the show notes. Kill Switch is hosted by me
Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluck Potts, and
Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle
Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show. From Kaleidoscope, Our
executive producers or oswall Lashin, mangesh Hati Kadur and Kate Osborne.
(34:03):
From iHeart Art executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E.
Tour catch on the Next One.
Hey, it's Dexter. Before we get in today's episode, just
the heads up that we're going to be talking about suicide.
So if that's not something you're comfortable hearing about, no worries,
and we'll catch on the next one.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Nikol was a star student. His parents are farmers and
comes from a humble family. In fact, when he landed
a job at Ula Crutrem, which is a high profile
AI company, banners went up in his village because nobody
had gone as far as he had in that village,
you know. But then he started working at the company
(00:42):
and he realized that the work culture is not what
he expected.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Part MN is an independent journalist who recently wrote a
piece for the publication Rest of World and the title
of that article is death of an Indian tech Worker.
It's about Nicol Simwanci, a twenty four year old machine
learning engineer in Bangalore, a city that some people were
nicknamed India's Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
His family members told me that he had started working
fifteen hours a day. His manager was kind of abrasive,
which was not something he was used to. He was
a very soft spoken, polite sort of a guy. When
he had come home for a couple of weeks he
had met his close friend. They caught up and he
basically told him that he's feeling a little lonely in
Bangalore and he was considering a move back. But his
(01:28):
family and the friend I spoke to said that it
was not easy for him to come back and just
abandon the job that had brought so much pride to
his parents. Right, it would have spread a bit of
negativity around him in the village, and he would have
thought that I've made my parents proud. I can't just
leave that and come back. And one evening he sent
(01:50):
a message to his roommate which tell my family it
was an accident. A few hours later, his body was
found in a lake in Bangalore.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell my family that it was an accident. Yeah, Nicol
was someone that people looked up to. This is a
young man from a tiny village who got out and
got himself a job at a respected, big company. What
happened to him there is a really long story and
a really sad story, but it's not a unique story.
(02:22):
Cross reporting shows that there is an increasing trend of
people leaving poor upbringings only to go die in the
big city, and the connection is India's tech industry from
Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
I'm all right.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
India has always had a suicide problem. In fact, that
suicide rate is more than the global rate. But some
of the suicides that have happened in India are largely
suicides of farmers.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
India's farmers have been in international news for the past
few years. Back in twenty twenty, farmers and unions representing
over two hundred and fifty million people staged the largest
protest in recorded human history. You might have seen some
of the footage of this. Farmers driving tractors from northern
India down to Delhi demonstrating against proposed laws that they
said would make it impossible for them to make a living.
(03:51):
More than half of India's population relies on agriculture for
the livelihood, and things have gotten so bad economically that
people are getting desperate. Part has been reporting on this
topic for over a decade.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Farmers have been dying by suicide, especially since the nineteen nineties,
in huge numbers. I mean, between nineteen ninety five twenty fifteen,
more than three hundred thousand farmers have died by suicide
in India. The Indian government has stopped counting, like tide
data fudging of farmer suicides because the numbers started looking
really bad, but the trend has only worsened.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
Stopped counting.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, they're bearing bodies in other columns basically, so there
are certain states that will show no farm suicides, but
certainly other suicides quote unquote, other suicides would have shot
through the roof. But the farmers are not the only
profession that is struggling right now. It's also pilled over
into the white collar jobs.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Part reporting takes him to rural villages across India, talking
to people who live there about the pressures they're dealing
with that lead to this increase in suicides. But recently
he's been noticing another trend outside of the villages and
instead in the big cities, specifically in these tech hubs
Bangalore and Hyderobar. Or rather, he's been noticing the same
(05:05):
trend just in a different demographic suicides among white collar
tech workers.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Over the past few years. As someone who follows news
in India, you keep coming across stories of tech workers
few sides, and these are isolated suicides and then there
are maybe Twitter threads and Twitter hashtags that follow for
a couple of days, and then it goes quiet for
a few more days until there's another suicide. So we've
(05:31):
been seeing quite a few of them over the past
few years. In fact, when we analyzed the newspaper reports,
we found there were two hundred and twenty seven techworkers
suicides in the last eight or nine years, and that's
a fairly big number. India doesn't maintain data for it
worker suicides specifically, but the last recorded number for white
(05:53):
collar workers was ten percent of the suicides that have
happened in India for years.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
In the tech industry has been thought of as a
path out of the village, getting out of the farming village,
going to a big city, getting in the tech industry.
That's the dream for a lot of people, and for
a poor person, a tech job in Bangalore could lift
your entire family out of poverty. But Paths Reporting is
finding that instead these workers are essentially going to the
(06:20):
big cities and dying there.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Some of the stories that you come across in newspapers,
you see tech worker suicides in say it, hubs of
Bangalore or Pune or Hyderabad, but when you look at
some of the people who have died by suicides, they
are not from Bangalore or Hyderabad. They come from marginalized families,
farming families, you know, working class families, and they are
(06:45):
sort of looking to, you know, uplift themselves and their families,
bring their families out of financial trouble and basically breaking
their back over it.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
For Nichols Sawacci, this was the game plan since he
was a young boy. His family did everything they could
to get Nico educated so that he could have opportunities
that they never had.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
His parents had to sell a portion of their farmland
and their house to get his son and his elder
sister educated. In fact, when he was nine years old
or ten years old, his father enrolled him in a
school which was forty minutes away from his village because
it was an English medium instruction village, and that's something
(07:27):
that they wanted him to study in and cultivate naturally
if he had to go out and do something that
they couldn't do. So his parents worked really hard, very
humble family. He worked really hard to get where he
had gotten.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
When Nico landed a job at an Ai infrastructure company
called Ola cruture. It was a really big deal. He'd
made it. What does it mean for a kid from
a rural village to go out and make it in
a place like Bangalore and.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
It's a huge deal.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
His first salary was ten times more than what his
parents earned from farming, so you can imagine what a
huge deal it was for his parents. And villages are
generally a tight knit community, so when someone from the
village does well, the entire village sort of.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Celebrates, and he does mean celebrating. People back home in
nichols village put up banners all over town to show
how proud of him they were. But less than a
year later, Nichol would take his own life. Not even
the police seem to have any real answers. But the
story of Nichol's death shows us a lot about India's
tech industry and about how people in other countries, including
(08:36):
the United States, are influencing that toxic work culture that's
after the break. What is the work culture like right
now in the tech industry in India?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
It's quite toxic.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Having spoken to a bunch of it professionals, eighty three
percent of them say they've burnt out and one in
four like twenty five clock seventy hours a week, which
is a lot. And even then you have some titans
of the industry saying there should be atrs and ninety
hours work week.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
This is a trend amongst tech companies in India. The
founder of one company says that he expects a seventy
hour work week. The chairman of another says he wants
ninety hour work weeks. The founder of the company that
Nickel worked for refers to the concept of work life
balance as a Western import.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
I don't agree with this work life balance concept. I
think that's an outcome of again a Western thought process,
of a post industrial, of of the industrial era. But
our interesting ari thoughts was never that.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That's bubbish Augerwald, the CEO of OLA, on a podcast
in the summer of twenty twenty four. On that same show,
he said, quote, I have a strong belief that one
generation will have to do penance so that we can
build the number one country in the world, the largest economy.
End quote.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I mean, one tech worker told me that he's worked
through the night at some point in his job, got
home at six thirty and still reported back at ten thirty. Jeez,
there was one tech worker who told me that these
long guards make sure that he has very little time
for his family, his health. He started seeing a psychologist
because he's no longer in the right ream of mind.
(10:20):
One tech worker told me that there's obviously regular unpaid
overtime that they.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Have to do.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
And beyond the stress in psychological pressure, this culture is
also having physical effects on the workers. In Karnataka, that's
the state in India that's home to Bangalore.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India and
in Karnataka, you have a lot of patients looking for
organ donations and organ transplants, and a lot of them
are tech workers. In the ita Ab of Hyderabad, there
was a survey and study which came out recently. It
said that about eighty four percent of tech workers struggled
(10:56):
with atty liver disease, which is associated with stress and
long eay of sedentary work. They're overworked, they're overwhelmed, and
they have very little time for themselves and their families.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
For someone like Nikos Suwanci, the stresses of his new
job were on top of the fact that he was
already living in a place that was culturally and even
linguistically different from where he grew up.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
In his village, he spoke Marati, which is his native
language his mother tongue, something I speak as well. In Bangalore,
nobody speaks Marati. He had to have been engaging with
people in English, something that he was fine with because
he had learned in an English medium school. But still
that change matters, and when you don't have anybody around you,
(11:40):
it becomes difficult to settle down in an unfamiliar territory
right and at a time like that, when you have
a workplace that kind of toxic and abrasive, it makes
it even more difficult.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
But according to Part's conversation with family and friends, Nico
never let it show he knew people back home were
depending on him.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
I think one of the biggest things is the responsibility
right because parents, even though it even the parents or
families may not say that to their kids that we
are looking at you for financial security, the kids are
mature enough to understand that their parents are not earning
a lot of money. The kids are mature enough to
understand that the parents have sacrificed a lot to make
(12:23):
sure that they get educated. And so there's a lot
of pressure to succeed, and it is not easy. In
a country like India, which is inherently a labor surplus economy.
There are far too many people and far too few jobs,
and so when you land a job, it becomes very
difficult to walk away from it because you don't know
what the future holds. Right and someone like Nikol, who
(12:45):
came from the family that you did, who came from
the village of North mara Astra and did not have
financial security, we would have felt that pressure ten times
more than like someone like I would have felt, who
was born and praised in Mumbai. And I don't have
the kind of financial responsibilities that Nikl has, so I
can maybe take a lot more chances, and Nikkeil couldn't
(13:08):
afford to take any chances.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Part has come across a lot of stories like this,
highly educated college graduates who get stuck in a toxic
work environment but feel like they can't leave because they
have to provide for their family back home, or increasingly,
people who can't find work at all because there are
too many people competing for too few jobs.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I read a recent report in Economic Times which said
that in this current financial year, the top five it
companies in India have added a net seventeen employees one
to seven employees, whereas last year it was seventeen thousand.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
So there's a hiring freeze as well.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
I'm sorry, can you say that number again? You said
one seven?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yes, top art firms added just seventeen stuff in nine
months and hiring has nearly.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Frozen seven seventeen across all those companies.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
This is an Economic Times report I have in front
of me right now. And I met a family of
a twenty year audio old tech graduate who was looking
for a job, who had been looking for a job
for months. He had made his CV again. Came from
a small town. His father had passed away. His mother
and his grandmother had taught him up by running an
(14:24):
iron shop. They would press people's clothes and work as
domestic help, and that's how they raised this boy. He
would have also felt the responsibility to bring his mother
and mother some sort of financial stability. He was one
of the brighter students, but he couldn't get a job
for months. He ran from one place to another, asked
(14:45):
a lot of people about it. Eventually he also died
by suicide. And I met his mother. I met his
elder brother, and his elder brother told me that I'm
not as intelligent as in and we all thought that
he would go places, and now we may same all
the time, because he ended his life abruptly out of
depression and just feeling worthless because he was worth so
(15:09):
much and he wasn't getting anything. And his mother made
a very heartbreaking point when I spoke to her, she
said that I regret making sure that my son got
educated because if he had not studied, he wouldn't have
had those ambitions.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
And because he couldn't complete those ambitions, he ended up
dying by suicide. There are so many people out there
who are not educated. They work as laborers. They make
ten thousand rupeza a month, five thousand rupie a month, wow,
and they don't have the ambition of working in a
big office. And he had the ambition because he knew
he was worth a lot more. And because he couldn't
(15:44):
he fell short of that ambition. He went into depression
and ended up killing himself. And it was one of
the most heartbreaking conversations I've had as a reporter.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
This wasn't always the case. From the nineties to the
early two thousands, tech employees were in demand in big
cities like Bangalore and Hyderobar and the jobs would good jobs,
fair hours, good salaries, and a chance to build a
good life for yourself.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
They could work eight hours, help their families, give them time,
build a house, pace of family, and still make a
decent living. That is no longer possible. Twenty ten eleven onwards,
it started getting increasingly competitive. There's this one ceo I
spoke to. He said that in the early two thousands,
(16:32):
the tech industry was growing at a scorching pace. As
the industry got more and more competitive, companies started making
more and more competitive demands. And then that sort of
changed the nature of the industry. And over the past
I think five years, especially six years, especially since the pandemic,
that work culture has become even more toxic. Work from
(16:52):
home lurned, the boundaries between personal space and office hours,
and workers became answerable sort of.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
The main driver of the Indian tech economy is outsourced work.
At one point this meant call centers. Now it's morphed
into housing specialists for all kinds of technology needs. This
kind of work already requires Indian companies to provide services
around the clock in order to service the rest of
the world, and the companies pass those twenty four hour
obligations onto their employees. So this culture is encouraged by
(17:27):
the CEOs of some of these companies, But the pressure
that turns the gears of that culture machine isn't just
coming from the few executives. It's coming from outside. To
be more specific, it's also coming from the United States.
I think a lot of people say from the States
when they think of the tech industry in India. I
(17:48):
think they think of a couple of things. The first
would be outsourcing, or they would think of call centers.
I think another thing that people might think of is
people who immigrate from India and work in Silicon Valley.
But your reporting is showing that that's also changing and
putting a lot of pressure on workers also, Right, So the.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Are three things you just alluded to.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
One is the call centers, which are getting more and
more automated because of AA, so a lot of those
jobs have gone away. Secondly, outsourcing, which is the backbone
of India's tech industry. I think around sixty two percent
of India's tech revenue is driven by US. Outsourcing remains
India's backbone and that is why experts have told me
(18:31):
that IT remains more vulnerable to AI disruption. Traditional product
development companies won't be as affected as much as traditional
outsourcing companies. So a lot of these jobs are endangered,
and many of the workers also see it coming. One
IT worker basically told me that a lot of the
mid level managers are being laid off and when that happens,
(18:51):
they are not being replaced. Their work invariably falls on
employees below there. And the last thing you spoke about
is the immigrant population in the US, and that is
the Donnertrump hiking fees recently and the entire campaign at
an make America Great Again and anti magadation sort of campaign, as.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
A president signing a proclamation that now requires this one
hundred thousand dollars annual fee for this H one B
visa for highly skilled foreign workers. Now, this could be
a huge blow to big tech firms that rely heavily
on highly skilled forward workers to fill key roles.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Historically, the H one B visa program had been a
path for Indian tech workers to move to the US,
and it was a win win. Immigrant workers get a
high paying American job and their employers the US tech
companies really liked having this extra source of foreign talent.
But now the Trump administration has astronomically raised the fees
for those visas and American companies can't afford to hire
(19:50):
them anymore. So a lot of Indian workers who otherwise
might have gone to the US are staying in India
and they're competing for the very few jobs that are
available at home. They're getting thrown back into that pressure
cooker where the work culture is terrible, the hours are extreme,
and the jobs that are available are on the AI
shopping plot. Basically, the tech workforce in India is being
(20:12):
squeezed from every side.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
And if somebody pushes back, they are basically told to
fit the job and they can be easily replaced by
somebody else because there are hundreds of people waiting in
the wings. So that's the situation of tech workers in India.
They're sort of trapped. They have nowhere else to go.
And when the alls are stacked so much against you,
you can't really push for better conditions. You can't really
(20:36):
push back for paid over time and so on and
so forth, because the companies clearly hold all the chips.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
After the break India's union leaders get into the streets
to fight back against the tech industry. But will it work.
What are employees even able to do in these situations?
Because it's sounds like, even just from reading your articles,
so many people are anonymous. Is it that people are
(21:05):
afraid to speak up?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Absolutely, most of the employees are afraid to speak up.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
There. They are scared for their jobs.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Because if they are cooted in my piece and their
employee reads it, they're done. Not only will they lose
their job from that employer, they will not get a
job anywhere in the industry. Other employers will also find
excuses to not employ those people. So they are petrified.
They have very few legal protections. The cases basically drag
(21:37):
on for years, so by the time you get any
kind of justice, decades have passed, and so there's very
little one can do. So a lot of people flatly
refuse to speak to me, and the ones who agreed,
I had to go through some people who already knew me,
and they could sort of assure them that this person
is a llegitimate, credible journalist who won't disclose your identity,
(21:59):
and that's when they agree to speak to me. Even
the cases of suicides. A lot of family members were
reluctant to speak to me because many union leaders told
me that they're afraid. Many of them basically sign non
disclosure agreements with the companies. Many of them get paid
by the companies through a life insurance policy.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
According to union leaders, these companies will use corporate insurance
policies to compensate the families of the suicide victims. The
compensation comes with a catch.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
And then they're also worried about defamation, that the company
might drag them to court, and they don't want to
get into that, and they don't have the power to
sort of take on a company. So many of the
families who had lost their loved ones to suicide dude
toxic culture. They didn't come forward and speak to me.
Even Nichol's family, his parents didn't speak to me about
(22:48):
the companies. They said, we don't want to talk about
the company. We want to we only speak to you
on condition that we speak about my son and I'd
like to remember him. His parents basically said, we don't
want to talk about the company, and that basically tells
you how and why these huge multinational companies have been
able to get away with this kind of toxic work culture.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
In response to Nichol's death, Oha, the company released the
statement saying that they were quote deeply saddened with each death.
Companies put out similar statements, but not all workers are
keeping quiet about this. Last year, about seven hundred tech
workers staged protests in the streets of Bangalore. One of
their demands was that labor laws actually be enforced. This
(23:31):
is bold and we got to acknowledge that. But part
says that we have to keep that protest in perspective.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
They do protests, they have taken the streets, but the
IT industry employs around five million people in India and
some thirty thousand are part of the unions. So they
are doing what they can in their own way in
their own city.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Five million versus thirty thousand.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, so you know, thirty thousand people who are part
of these unions, it's not a large number. And then
they cannot pressurize the employers to make changes in the
way they work.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Yeah, I mean that's not even one percent.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Yeah, So the union leaders that I spoke to, they
are doing their best to mobilize, They're doing their best
to pressurize state governments into bringing some change, But because
the numbers are lacking, they're not able to put the
kind of pressure. And obviously the labor laws in India
are easily bypassed. The labor codes in India are not
(24:33):
very pro worker, so they are sort of squeezed from
every direction.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
So how do these companies respond.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
The company that I've reported on refused to comment. There
was another case that I have reference to. They didn't
want to comment on that either. I reached out to NASCOM,
which is India's top IT body, which represents the IT
company's interests. They gave the statement about AI and how
they see reshaping jobs and so on and so forth,
but they didn't speak about the allegations of toxic work culture.
(25:05):
They refuse to speak about the suicides. Whenever a suicide happens,
they released a sort of the usual statement about being
saddened by the loss and that we are cooperating with
the authorities and we're helping the family, and we're doing
our best to create a healthy workplace for our employees
and so on and so forth. So they release that
(25:25):
customary statement and.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
That's about it.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
When I spoke to some of the union leaders, they
made a good point. They said that even the police
and the lawyer out of machinery is unable or unwilling
to bring these companies to book because the state is
then losing revenue if the company moves to another state.
So a lot of the state government authorities they are
also unwilling to take on the large companies whenever a
(25:52):
suicide happens.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
So it is very easy.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
For the authorities to say that it could have been personal.
But the fact of them is, if work culture is
contributing to that stress, then it deserves to be investigated.
Nobody is saying that it was the only cause for
suit sides. Whenever take dies by suicide. Surely there could
be personal reasons, but if a toxic work culture, if
(26:16):
that work stress is contributing, is a contributing factor, then
it deserves to be investigated.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
When I first read parts article, in addition to being
shocked at all the horrible details, I was also kind
of ashamed that I didn't know about this thing that
probably everyone in India is talking about. Right well, I
actually know. Part says that a lot of people in
India don't necessarily realize how widespread this is. It's not
that people don't care, or that the public isn't paying attention.
(26:43):
It's that there are important details that the news isn't
usually telling them.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
There was one thing that I found while reporting this
story was that when I looked at the that's by
suicide the it workers, most of the news reports did
not mention the company they worked in. And that's so telling.
It's one of the basic things that you have to
do as a reporter, as a newspaper. You when you
mentioned someone has died by suicide in one company in
(27:10):
one city, why can't you mention the.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Name of that company?
Speaker 2 (27:14):
And many of those right, and the name of that
company because it would invite bad press, because it would
invite bad reputation. The name of that company is invisibilized
in many of these news reports. And then when I
had to dig further, I had to call the union
leaders and then I had to ask them, you know,
this is a report I found, but I don't know
what company they were working in. Then they sort of,
(27:35):
you know, call them, call their contacts, and they found
out which company the suicide happened in.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
I mean, this is something you want to know as
a potential worker. If I'm applying to someone. I'm finding
out that this is happening to the workers. There's probably
something wrong at that company. I want to know.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
That exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Many of these news reports do not mention the company,
and that just.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Tells you how even the media is.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Not entirely pro worker, and how they are sort of
trying to protect the employers. And it's actually not a
surprise when you look at the way the lawyer and
auder machinery operates, when you look at the way the
media operates, it is not a surprise that the tech
companies are able to get away with this toxic work culture.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
This phrase or the idea that one generation has to
pay a penance for India to become the number one
country in the world or for India to move forward.
This is something we've seen before, right, the kind of
work culture that people talk about in Korea, the kind
of work culture that people talk about in Japan. Sometimes
(28:44):
the kind of work culture that people talk about it
in China. Sometimes, you know, I think a lot of
times we make this mistake of thinking, oh, there must
be something ingrained in the cultural values. It's rapid economic development,
which is the underlying pattern here. It's very strange to
see the idea of penance being introduced and that hey,
(29:05):
we're just going to have to pay the price for
a generation. Okay, who is we?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Exactly, when you talk about rapid economic development.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
You have to ask whose development right? Right?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Because the person calling for penance has a network of
over a billion dollars and the people who are supposed
to be paying that penance are dying by susid they're
struggling to make the rent. And there's something that I've
always wondered when we talk about this rising GDP of
(29:38):
India and India becoming the third largest or fourth largest
economy and we're adding more and more billionaires, but at
the same time, sixty three million people enter poverty because
they don't have access to in public healthcare. There was
a study recently that was quite quite revealing even the
top five percent of income earners in Mumbai would need
(29:59):
us to agering one hundred and nine years to afford
a home. Even globally, house price to income ratio of
three x to six x is considered healthy, and anything
about ten x is typically flagged as sort of it's
a warning sign because it's unaffordable and by that sort
of metric. Indian metros are horrible. The HPI ratio in
Mumbai is thirty four x, in Bangalore is twenty two x.
(30:22):
And education has gotten more and more expensive. Healthcare has
gotten more and more expensive. So even if from the
outside it looks like you're making a decent sort of income,
you're still living paycheck to paycheck. You can say that,
of course, India has become the fourth largest economy, but
what about the per capita income? What is happening? If
the top one percent owns forty percent of the country's wealth,
(30:44):
then of course a GDP might look like it is.
India is the fourth largest economy in the world. But
the fact of the matter is people are struggling to
pay their rent and ninety percent of people are making
less than three hundred dollars a month. So when you
talk about rapid economic develop it is generally the development
of the developed and not the development of the working
(31:05):
class and the poor and the marginalized.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
What you're describing here is I think something that a
lot of listeners will know something about. Cost rising isn't
anything that's foreign, But you're describing a much more extreme
version of this, and you're describing it in a region
where a lot of people depend on Yeah, because of
exactly what you're talking about. You're talking about outsourcing, You're
talking about how much of the world actually does depend
(31:31):
on labor in the tech sector that is happening in India,
and they may not realize how precarious that is.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
I hope this story becomes a bit of a reality
check for the global tech industry, which India is an
integral part of. I want to make sure that the
tech industry, which is sort of you know, it's worth
two eighty billion dollars, it employs five million people, and
it's got these glittering numbers, there has to be some
reality check. There has to be some sense of, you know,
(32:06):
that facade has to.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Has to be broken.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
What I got from reading parts reporting and from talking
to him is that maybe sometimes when I read about
explosive growth in some market overseas, so maybe stop and
ask questions about who's back That growth is built on
valuations and stock prices and market ratios can only tell
you so much under all those numbers. Or people like
(32:33):
Nicol and his family.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I met his family. They were completely shattered. His father
was in tears. His mother had stopped eating, she had
become frail. She had to go to the hospital a
couple of times. It was a very heartbreaking situation when
I interviewed them. When I met them, his father in
fact told me that there's a photograph of Nikkel in
their house and they've put up sort of a blanket
(33:01):
on top of that photograph because when they see him,
they miss him, so they can't even bear to see
his face on that photograph without really breaking down.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of
kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you
can email us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
or on Instagram. We're at kill switch pod. And if
you find this stuff interesting or valuable, you know, maybe
leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast.
It helps other people find the show, which helps us
keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did
(33:39):
you know that kill Switch is on YouTube and link
for that and everything else you need to know is
in the show notes. Kill Switch is hosted by me
Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluck Potts, and
Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by Me and Kyle
Murdoch and Kyle also mixed the show. From Kaleidoscope, Our
executive producers or oswall Lashin, mangesh Hati Kadur and Kate Osborne.
(34:03):
From iHeart Art executive producers are Katrina Norvil and Nikki E.
Tour catch on the Next One.
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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