We Need To Go Where Talent Is Instead Of Forcing Them To Migrate: Wipro Chairman

Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji on Wednesday said that Indian IT industry needs to reach out to the talent wherever it is available instead of forcing them to migrate to larger cities.

As companies globally struggle to acquire and retain talent, people are still having to move to larger cities to gain employment with sectors like technology. Despite the push remote work has received during the pandemic, Premji was of opinion that companies still fail to reach out to talent located beyond the big cities in India. 

“Today, the conversation is all about finding and accessing the best talent to build new models for relevance in the digital economy,” Premji said. He added that India is the talent hub but the challenge is to find the talent and leverage it to fulfill demand.

Addressing the issue of attrition in IT sector at Invest Karnataka Summit 2022, he said the reason for this is because the whole IT industry is chasing the same pool of talent. “Instead, we need to find new locations and new sources of talent,” the Wipro chairman said.

Wipro’s attrition rate came down to 23 per cent marginally in the September quarter from 23.3 per cent Q1 FY23.

He emphasised that the Covid-19 pandemic had proven that work can be done remotely, at scale. Supporting the idea of remote work, Premji said that it could widen the talent pool, especially for women and people with disabilities.

“We have a very large number of highly skilled young workers and the largest number of engineers in the world. But instead of going to where the talent is, we force the talent to migrate to big cities where the jobs are,” he said.

Premji said that not reaching out to talent wherever they are can greatly limit the talent pool and put huge strain on the infrastructure in big cities, which will push up the cost of living and even hurt environment. 

“I deeply applaud the efforts of the government of Karnataka in setting up new technology clusters in our Tier 2 and 3 cities. As part of the Karnataka Digital Economy mission,” the Wipro scion said.

Speaking on reaching out to cities beyond metros, Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, "As Rishad mentioned, one of the very impressive things that the (Karnataka) government has done is address the issue of talent and opportunity through deft policymaking and moving the opportunities in the post covid world to Tier 2 and 3 cities, where there is less pressure on infrastructure."

Premji appealed that the IT sector needs to get behind the initiative of reskilling the existing talent too. “Four years ago, our PM launched the NASSCOM’s Future Skills Platform for upskilling and reskilling employees and students in new age technologies like AI, robotics, and virtual reality,” he said.

“We need more such initiatives to rapidly build our digital pool,” he added.

In addition, Premji said that the public and private industries will have to invest more in long term and conduct in-depth research to continue developing in new emerging technologies.