Chapter Synopsis
Let me tell you about a certain pride that this country invented. It was the pride of a young man from Lucknow — a middle-income family, one government-servant father, one mother who had sacrificed her own ambitions quietly — who walked into an air-conditioned office, put on a headset, and for the very first time in his life spoke to someone sitting in London. Not as a servant. Not as someone asking for a favour. As a professional.
That pride was real. You could hear it in calls home: 'Amma, I got the job. The one with the night shift. The salary is twenty-two thousand.' You could hear the family stop breathing on the other end. This was not just a job. It was the first rung of a ladder India had built out of its own ingenuity — the English-speaking, cost-effective, technically literate workforce that the world needed and that India could supply.
Net new BPO hiring in India fell from 177,000 in 2021–22 to under 17,000 in 2023–25. India holds 52% of the global outsourcing market. The Jefferies investment bank projected in September 2025 that AI would have a 50% revenue impact on call centres and 35% on back-office BPO within five years.
At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February 2026, Vinod Khosla said plainly: 'By 2030, there will be no such thing as IT services. There will be no such thing as BPO. Those are gone.' These were not the words of a technology pessimist. They were the words of the man who has funded more technology companies than almost anyone alive.
The bridge that millions were still crossing has been broken. This chapter is about what happens to the people who are halfway across — and about the dignity that was real, even if the destination no longer exists.
'By 2030, there will be no such thing as IT services. There will be no such thing as BPO. Those are gone.' — Vinod Khosla, India AI Impact Summit 2026