Author: Dr. Prajjal Saha | HRKatha

Vedanta has set a target to hire more than half its STEM recruits as women starting this year, a sharp shift in an industry where female representation has long hovered in single digits. The announcement, timed to the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, comes as women currently account for over 35 per cent of the company’s STEM fresher hiring. When leadership and management roles are included, that figure climbs to 45 per cent. It’s a notable marker in metals and mining, where women have historically been nearly absent from technical and operational roles. While women make up…

In corporate India, 58 is often treated as an exit ramp. Superannuation arrives, farewells are organised, and identities long fused with designation quietly dissolve. Jaikrishna B sees it differently. On May 7, 1990, he entered his first job as a management trainee. Thirty-five years later—25 of them in leadership roles shaping organisations, people and culture—he is stepping into what he calls Project ACT+. Not a consultancy. Not a firm with letterhead and office space. But a consciously designed portfolio life that blends advisory work, coaching, teaching, community contribution and a return to acting—a creative pursuit he set aside decades ago.…

Every knowledge worker recognises the phenomenon. A project sits frozen on a digital task board, its status unchanged for weeks. The internal discussion channel has gone quiet. Nobody genuinely believes it will ever be completed, yet it remains officially “active”. Welcome to the world of zombie projects — initiatives that are neither alive enough to progress nor decisively shut down. The scale of the problem is striking. Research by Atlassian surveying thousands of office workers globally suggests that nearly half began 2026 weighed down by such undead initiatives. More troubling, over 90 per cent report tangible consequences: stress from cluttered…

A manager at a Bengaluru tech company noticed something odd. Her Gen Z team routinely questioned her decisions and pushed back on direction. But when one team member quietly started using a new productivity tool, the entire team followed within days — no mandate, no approval, no discussion required. When asked why, the answer was simple: “Everyone’s using it.” This is the Gen Z paradox. They won’t follow you because you’re the boss. But they will follow one another instantly, at scale, without hesitation. By 2030, Gen Z will make up nearly 30 per cent of the global workforce. Understanding…

On 1 February , 2026, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Yuva Shakti Budget—Rs 32,666 crore for Labour, Rs 9,886 crore for skills (62 per cent jump), and Rs 20,083 crore for employment schemes. The headline numbers are impressive. But what actually changes for employees, HR teams, and employers? Here are the 15 things you need to know. Money & Compensation 1. No tax relief for employees—increment burden falls entirely on employers What changed: New Income Tax Act 2025 (April 1, 2026) brings no slab changes, no Section 80C increase, no higher standard deduction. What it means: Employee take-home increases…

If aliens ever study corporate life, they’ll be baffled by one thing above all: our complete inability to choose the right communication format. We schedule hour-long meetings to share information that could fit in three bullet points. Then we fire off vague emails about complex, emotionally charged issues that desperately need a conversation. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that the worst possible medium is always the correct one. This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about a deeper workplace pathology: we’ve lost all sense of what actually requires human interaction and what doesn’t. The result? A daily carnival of miscommunication, wasted…

While Budget 2026 has been sold as a Rs 42,000 crore wager on India’s talent pipeline, its operational consequences for HR leaders lie elsewhere. A new income-tax regime comes into force on April 1. Artificial intelligence finally receives explicit government attention as a job disruptor. And some of the most consequential workforce problems—wages, social security and informalisation—are once again left untouched. For CHROs, this is a budget of adjustments, not relief. Take-home reality The new Income Tax Act, effective April 1, promises simplification: rationalised TDS and TCS rates, integrated assessment and penalty proceedings, cleaner compliance. For employees, the impact is…

When India’s finance minister unveiled the so-called “Yuva Shakti Budget”, the numbers did the shouting.  Rs 32,666 crore for labour,  Rs 9,886 crore for skills,  Rs 20,083 crore for employment incentives. In total, more than  Rs 42,000 crore aimed at turning India’s youthful population into a productive workforce. For human-resources leaders, however, the question is not whether the sums are impressive. It is whether any of this money will show up where it matters most: in interview rooms. India has heard ambitious promises on employability before. Degrees multiplied. Certificates flourished. Hiring managers remained unimpressed. JaiKrishna B, enterprise and family business…

Last week, workforce strategist Amanda Goodall reignited the cycle by calling to “remove 90 per cent of HR.” The post went viral. Thousands shared it. Comments split cleanly between employees saying “finally” and HR professionals rushing to defend the function. What’s interesting is not the outrage. It’s the repetition. This debate resurfaces every few years. Different person. Same argument. Identical response pattern. “HR is useless bureaucracy.” “HR prevents lawsuits.” “HR protects companies, not workers.” “That’s literally the job.” Round and round. The cycle repeats because the underlying tension never resolves. HR cannot serve two masters—legal protection for the company and…

Harvard economist Gita Gopinath delivered Davos’s most uncomfortable statistic: since the 1980s, only 30 per cent of India’s growth has come from labour. The rest? Capital. For a country that spent decades celebrating its demographic dividend, this represents fundamental failure. India hasn’t chosen to be capital-intensive—regulatory friction forced it. Companies opted for machines rather than navigate labour laws. This isn’t India-specific. It’s pattern recognition playing out globally: capital replacing labour faster than new jobs emerge, skills gaps widening faster than training adapts, regulatory complexity making buying machines easier than hiring people. Five themes from Davos make clear this is accelerating.…

Spotify largely avoids leadership approval for routine product features. Squads, small teams owning specific user experiences, make those calls based on user data, technical constraints, and strategic direction. Leadership ensures squads understand company strategy, removes obstacles, and coordinates dependencies. The result is speed. Spotify ships faster than competitors with centralised approval models, not because their engineers are superior, but because decisions happen where information lives rather than where hierarchy lives. Netflix operates similarly. Their “context, not control” philosophy means leaders provide clarity on company goals and then trust teams to decide. Approval chains are minimal. Formal review gates are few.…

Remember Tata Nano? The Rs 1 lakh car that was supposed to revolutionise Indian mobility? It didn’t fail because the engineering was poor. It failed because Tata positioned it as the “cheapest car in India.” That single word, cheapest, killed any aspiration to own it. Nobody wants to be seen driving the cheapest anything. The positioning created a perception problem the product could never escape. Here’s what’s interesting: Tata built Nano with genuine intent. Make car ownership accessible to millions. Replace dangerous two-wheelers carrying entire families. Democratise mobility. Noble goal. But the execution—obsessive focus on hitting Rs 1 lakh price…

This week, Forbes predicted 2026 will finally end the college degree’s dominance as workplace bootcamps become standard and traditional credentials carry less weight in a skills-first market. It’s a seductive prediction. Progressive. Egalitarian. Emotionally satisfying. It’s also dangerous nonsense that will cost workers who believe it. Here’s the tell, buried three paragraphs into the same breathless prediction: bachelor’s degree holders earn 68 per cent more per week than those with just high school diplomas. Skills-first hiring is supposedly ending degree tyranny, yet degree holders earn sixty-eight per cent more. Not declining. Not narrowing. Sixty-eight per cent more, right now, while…

I spoke with Subir Sinha just two weeks ago. We talked for hours that evening, and he was hopeful—genuinely optimistic about his recovery. He told me about the projects he was working on, the startups he was helping, the people he was connecting. Even battling cancer, Subir was thinking about others. That was who he was. Subir passed away on December 26, 2025, at 58. He may not have been one of those “big league” CHROs speaking at conferences or writing viral LinkedIn posts. And that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to be famous to be exceptional. Not every successful…

Somewhere between 1,80,000 tech layoffs globally and the invention of ‘job-hugging’ as a workplace trend, 2025 became the year Indian workplaces stopped pretending. The masks came off. What we found underneath wasn’t pretty, but at least it was honest. “We’re a Family” finally died After years of companies calling themselves “families” whilst laying off thousands via Zoom, the metaphor mercifully expired in 2025. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced major workforce cuts. Microsoft eliminated 9,000 employees. Indian startups shed 9,500 jobs across the year. Nobody called these families. They called them “strategic workforce optimisations” and “AI-driven restructuring”—which is at least honest…

A fintech startup CEO recently hired a CHRO from a Fortune 500 bank. Twenty years’ experience, managed 5,000+ employees, built award-winning programmes. Within six months, the company was drowning in approval hierarchies whilst competitors hired faster. The CEO was baffled. He’d hired brilliance. What went wrong? Everything—because he’d hired credentials for the wrong context. But it’s not just startup versus corporate. A manufacturing CHRO joining IT services faces similar failure. So does an IT CHRO joining BFSI. An e-commerce CHRO struggles in pharmaceuticals. A services CHRO flounders in product companies. HR expertise doesn’t transfer across contexts because the contexts demand…

Social media erupted when MP Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 in Parliament. LinkedIn posts celebrated the end of after-hours emails. Twitter debated work-life balance. WhatsApp groups shared fantasies of ignoring Sunday night messages without career consequences. The bill sounds transformative: employees legally protected from work communication outside designated hours. An Employees’ Welfare Authority monitoring compliance. Companies with 10+ employees must negotiate disconnection rules. Overtime requires mutual consent and compensation. No disciplinary action for non-response. This follows Kerala becoming India’s first state with disconnection legislation, drawing inspiration from France, Portugal, and Spain. The provisions are substantive, not…

Two thousand flights cancelled in five days. Everyone’s analysing operational failure, regulatory non-compliance, passenger chaos. What nobody’s discussing: ground staff abandoned at check-in counters whilst leadership remained invisible, and the HR function that watched this disaster approach for two years without raising alarms loud enough to matter. IndiGo’s real failure wasn’t operational. It was human. And it exposes what happens when HR becomes so obsessed with cost control that it forgets its fundamental responsibility: protecting the organisation from itself. The scene at the counters Picture check-in counters during the crisis. Ground staff earning perhaps Rs 25,000 monthly faced hours of…

The shadow job market has industrialised, and nobody’s paying attention. According to Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence’s report, forums posted twice as many résumés and job listings in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. Those numbers haven’t dropped—they’ve plateaued at crisis levels. This isn’t fringe activity confined to hardened criminals. It’s a structured labour market where 69 per cent of job seekers openly state they’ll take any paid opportunity, from programming to running scams to high-stakes cyber operations. The most alarming statistic: the median job seeker age is just 24, with marked teenage presence. India’s young workforce—celebrated for technical skills and…

Every workplace has its own language—a peculiar dialect where words mean everything except what they actually say. It’s a place where “We need to be more agile” translates to “We have no idea what we’re doing,” and “Let’s take this offline” means “I disagree with you but refuse to do so publicly.” Welcome to the corporate phrasebook, where euphemism reigns supreme and clarity goes to die. The Time Stealers “Quick sync” Translation: A 45-minute meeting that could have been a two-line email. Nothing about it will be quick. Someone will share their screen and struggle with audio for the first…

After decades of working under colonial-era labour laws, India’s workforce woke up on November 22, 2024, to a fundamentally different employment landscape. The new Labour Codes 2025 don’t just shuffle paperwork—they rewrite the rules on your salary, your rights, your safety, and your future. Whether you’re a permanent employee, a contract worker, a gig worker delivering food, or someone working from home, these changes affect you directly. Here’s what you need to know about your new rights and what’s changing in your working life. Money: wages, salaries, and benefits 1. Everyone gets a minimum wage—no exceptions  What’s new: Every single…

India’s government has enacted what it calls “historic” labour reform—consolidating 29 laws into four codes covering wages, industrial relations, social security, and workplace safety. The consolidation is real. The promises are substantial: simpler compliance, stronger protections, universal minimum wages, social security for gig workers. The question isn’t whether these codes are well-intentioned—they clearly are. It’s whether the implementation framework exists to make them functional. The codes provide the blueprint. Success depends entirely on building the infrastructure, capacity, and alignment that legislation alone cannot create. Making formalisation economically rational Ninety per cent of India’s workforce remains informal—not because registration is impossible,…

India woke up on 22 November to a fundamentally different labour regime. No warning, no grace period, no phased rollout. The government implemented four labour codes consolidating 29 laws, many dating to the British Raj. Old statutes stand repealed. New rules apply immediately—except where state-level regulations haven’t been notified yet, which is most places. For organisations, this creates an unusual predicament: comply with laws whose implementation details don’t yet exist. The government’s advice? Follow existing rules during transition. This is rather like being told to drive on new roads still under construction. Yet beneath the implementation chaos lies something genuinely…

India’s Global Capability Centre story sounds like unstoppable triumph. Over 1,800 centres employing 1.9 million professionals. Projections suggesting growth to 2,600 centres and $470-600 billion by 2030, potentially creating 2.6-3.9 million jobs. Government and industry leaders celebrate India as the “global hub for GCCs.” But here’s what nobody’s saying: this growth trajectory assumes something that isn’t happening—a fundamental transformation in how India develops, deploys, and retains talent across vastly different sectors and geographies. The GCC boom is racing toward multiple talent walls simultaneously. The sector complexity nobody discusses GCCs aren’t monolithic. Technology accounts for just 20 per cent of India’s…

The sticky organisations of tomorrow won’t be those offering the highest salaries or fanciest perks. They’ll be the ones offering the best managers—the kind who make people want to stay, grow, and belong. This isn’t motivational rhetoric but cold economic logic. Yet too many organisations—in India and globally—still default to compensation as their primary retention lever, then watch attrition reports arrive quarterly with perplexed dismay. Gallup’s research demonstrates managers account for at least 70% of variance in team engagement. The evidence is unambiguous: management quality determines whether organisations retain talent or become talent graveyards—places people join for experience but abandon…

As a journalist covering the advertising industry, I knew Piyush Pandey’s reputation long before I met him. Everyone did. His name carried an unseen aura—the man who transformed Indian advertising, whose campaigns became cultural phenomena. When you’re about to interview someone of that stature, you brace for ego, distance, the carefully managed persona that usually accompanies industry legends. Then you’d meet him, and the aura would dissolve into something far more interesting: a man genuinely surprised by his own legend, who spoke about work as though he were still figuring it out, who was closer to people than his reputation…