Many of us have grown up in an era where securing a job was the quintessential path to success. First, it was primarily government and PSU positions, then with privatisation and economic liberalisation, private-sector roles became equally coveted by the Indian middle class—particularly for their impressive packages and perks. The Seventh Pay Commission nearly levelled the playing field just as government employees were growing anxious about private-sector compensation.
In the post-Independence era, the salaried job represented stability and respectability. Government jobs were especially revered—not just for their steady pay but for the social stature they conferred. With the advent of the private sector in the 1990s, corporate roles became equally coveted, promising higher salaries, performance-linked bonuses, and access to a lifestyle once unimaginable.
For generations, the average middle-class Indian’s key to success has been a monthly salary. In many communities, especially non-business ones, entrepreneurship was considered a fall-back option for those who failed to secure employment. Even entrepreneurial families often preferred their younger generation to seek salaried employment. Stability was the currency of success, and the salaryman was its custodian.
In a society that measured success through EMIs, marriage prospects, and upward mobility, a salaried job was not just employment—it was a ticket to aspiration. The significance of a steady salary in an Indian household cannot be overstated. It represented access to otherwise unattainable assets—homes, durables, and clothing—through EMIs, for which eligibility hinged entirely on proof of regular income. In many communities, it even influenced marriage prospects and dowry considerations.
In essence, the salaryman has always been the hero of Indian society.
A seismic shift
Now, a statement from a prominent investor has shaken this foundational belief. Saurabh Mukherjea, founder and chief investment officer, Marcellus Investment Managers, believes India is entering a new economic era—one that no longer guarantees stability for the educated, hardworking urban Indian. His verdict is stark: the salaryman is dying.
“The defining flavour of this decade will be the death of salaried employment as a worthwhile avenue for educated, determined, hardworking people,” he declared on a recent podcast titled ‘Beyond the paycheck: India’s entrepreneurial rebirth.’
The term ‘salaryman’ originates from Japanese corporate culture, describing white-collar workers who demonstrate unwavering loyalty to their employers, often prioritising work over family and personal life. These individuals typically work long hours regardless of overtime compensation and socialise extensively with colleagues and superiors—a concept that found remarkable resonance in Indian professional culture.
This prediction from Mukherjea is particularly striking given his background. He acknowledges that families like his—”Marathi or Bengali, like many of us”—were built around steady employment. His father worked at a public sector undertaking while his mother taught at a school in Delhi. This Bengali professional would likely have faced severe criticism from his own community had he made such a statement just a decade ago.
The comfortable delusion we can no longer afford
When Mukherjea declared that “the defining flavour of this decade will be the death of salaried employment as a worthwhile avenue for educated, determined, hardworking people,” he wasn’t simply making an investment prediction. He was pronouncing the end of a social contract that has defined Indian middle-class life for generations.
The reaction has been predictable: denial, anger, bargaining—the classic stages of grief. Yet while we’re busy mourning, the ground beneath our feet has already shifted. Companies are quietly hollowing out their middle management. According to a 2024 McKinsey report, Indian corporations have reduced middle management roles by 18 per cent over the past three years, with projections suggesting a further 30 per cent reduction by 2030.
Artificial intelligence is consuming white-collar work at an accelerating pace. The traditional career ladder isn’t just missing a few rungs—it’s being dismantled entirely. Recent data from the Indian Staffing Federation shows that permanent white-collar hiring dropped by 23 per cent between 2022-2024, while project-based and contractual work increased by 37 per cent.
“Much of what was supposed to be done by white-collar workers is now done by AI,” Mukherjea points out. “Google says a third of its coding is already done by AI. The same is coming for Indian IT, media, and finance.” Indeed, a 2023 NASSCOM report estimated that 35 per cent of routine coding and testing tasks in India’s IT sector would be automated by 2025, affecting nearly 700,000 jobs.
Here’s what nobody dares say aloud: the Indian salaryman’s death was inevitable because he was never particularly valuable to begin with. He was replaceable—a cog in a machine designed to convert time into moderate prosperity. And machines that convert time into prosperity are precisely what technology does best.
Beyond Mukherjea: The hidden cultural costs of salaryman worship
What Mukherjea doesn’t fully address is how our salaryman worship has exacted terrible costs beyond mere economic vulnerability. It has stifled innovation, crushed creativity, and perpetuated toxic workplace cultures.
Consider this: while the world’s most dynamic economies celebrate entrepreneurial failure as a badge of learning, Indian families still treat career risk as a moral failing. While global businesses seek creative thinkers who challenge conventions, our education system still rewards conformity and memorisation. While leading organisations recognise the value of diverse perspectives, our workplaces still privilege hierarchy and seniority over merit and innovation.
Our veneration of the salaryman hasn’t just left us economically vulnerable—it has made us intellectually timid. The same parent who proudly claims “my son is in a government bank” would rarely boast “my daughter is on her third startup after two failures.” This cultural bias has produced generations of risk-averse professionals who prioritise job security over impact.
The JAM trinity isn’t enough
Mukherjea correctly identifies India’s digital infrastructure—the JAM Trinity of Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar identification, and mobile connectivity—as enablers of entrepreneurship. But infrastructure alone cannot transform a risk-averse culture into a risk-embracing one. Technical capability without psychological readiness is like building highways without teaching people to drive.
The uncomfortable truth is that India’s entrepreneurial revolution will require far more than digital rails. It demands a fundamental rewiring of how we define success, how we respond to failure, and how we value contribution beyond organisational hierarchies.
The regional dimensions of India’s employment transformation
The death of the salaryman is not occurring uniformly across India. In metro cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Delhi, the shift is already well underway. A 2023 survey by LinkedIn showed that 42 per cent of young professionals in these cities were actively pursuing side hustles alongside their primary employment, with 28 per cent planning to transition to full-time entrepreneurship within two years.
Contrast this with Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, where traditional employment remains the dominant aspiration. In states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha, government jobs continue to receive hundreds of thousands of applications for a handful of positions. The entrepreneurial revolution remains concentrated in urban centres with strong digital infrastructure and access to capital.
This geographic divide threatens to exacerbate existing inequalities unless policymakers take deliberate steps to democratise entrepreneurial opportunities across the country.
The invisible barriers nobody’s discussing
What’s missing from most discussions about India’s entrepreneurial future is an honest reckoning with the invisible barriers that prevent talented individuals from taking risks:
First, our social welfare systems remain woefully inadequate. In societies with stronger safety nets, entrepreneurial risk is cushioned by knowing one’s basic needs will still be met if a venture fails. In India, failure can mean catastrophe for entire families. According to a 2023 study by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, 67 per cent of potential entrepreneurs cited ‘lack of financial safety net’ as their primary reason for not pursuing business opportunities.
Second, our venture capital ecosystem, while growing, remains concentrated on a narrow slice of business models and founders. In 2023, just four cities—Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Hyderabad—accounted for 84 per cent of all VC funding in India. The entrepreneurial opportunities Mukherjea envisions require vastly more distributed capital, reaching beyond metropolitan elites to tap India’s true potential.
Third, our education system continues to prepare students for employment rather than value creation. We teach compliance rather than creativity, consumption rather than construction. A 2023 FICCI report found that only 11 per cent of Indian graduates felt their education had prepared them adequately for entrepreneurship.
Fourth, and perhaps most damning, our regulatory environment still punishes small businesses with byzantine compliance requirements while favouring established players. The Indian entrepreneurial renaissance requires not just cultural change but policy reform.
What must be done
If the death of the Indian salaryman is inevitable—and it is—then we must urgently create the conditions for what comes next. This means radically reforming education to emphasise creativity, critical thinking, and comfort with ambiguity rather than rote memorisation and test performance.
Schools and universities must incorporate entrepreneurship into their core curriculum, with practical project-based learning replacing theoretical examinations. We must develop stronger social safety nets that make entrepreneurial risk psychologically feasible for ordinary Indians, not just those with family wealth to fall back on. This could include unemployment insurance schemes, healthcare that isn’t tied to employment, and simplified bankruptcy procedures that don’t permanently stigmatise failure.
Access to capital must expand beyond traditional networks, reaching talented individuals regardless of their background or connections. While angel investment and venture capital have grown substantially, they remain inaccessible to entrepreneurs from non-elite backgrounds or those outside major urban centres. Perhaps most importantly, we need to celebrate entrepreneurial failure as a necessary step toward innovation, changing our cultural narrative around risk and setbacks. Media outlets, educational institutions, and family structures must embrace a new definition of success that values creative contribution over institutional stability.
The new heroes we need
For too long, we’ve lionised the wrong role models: the government official with lifetime tenure, the corporate executive with a predictable career path, the professional with letters after their name. These are yesterday’s heroes, optimised for yesterday’s economy.
Tomorrow belongs to a different breed: the resilient risk-taker, the creative problem-solver, the boundary-crosser who creates value where none existed before. Our challenge is not merely to accept this future but to actively shape it by redefining what we celebrate and what we teach.
When parents begin boasting about their children’s creative ventures rather than their secure jobs, when educational institutions value original thinking over test scores, when policymakers prioritise entrepreneurial dynamism over bureaucratic stability—then we’ll know the transformation is complete.
The Indian salaryman is indeed dying. But from his ashes, a far more valuable and vibrant economic identity can emerge—if we have the courage to embrace it.
The question isn’t whether this change is coming. It’s whether we will be its victims or its architects.