For about a decade now, IT majors like TCS, Wipro and Infosys have been merrily hiring fresh graduates to serve what often looks like bottomless demand. But training costs to make fresh graduates yield productive hours are rismg.

According to industry watchers, freshers form in excess of 50 per cent of the total workforce. Often, they are kept on the "bench" as they wait for work to arrive, but staggering demand and rising wages mean brakes on that luxury for IT companies.

Young techies like Singh are anxious, because freshers are not treated with a kid glove anymore.

"We are concerned about our jobs and the talk inside the com- pany is that the salary hikes will be much lesser as compared to last year," says an employee at TCS in Pune.

TCS has an employee strength of 1,08,000 and 500 workers getting the sack may not be a big deal, but it is not the only company that seems to be in a cutback mode - if rumours are to be believed.

Multinational IBM's chief executive Sam Palmisano went out of his way to assure employees that there would be no job cuts, but the company that has tens of thousands of techies working in India did not respond to queries on the issue from Hindustan Times.

Industry experts say quality of work is critical as Indian IT companies move from hourly billing to service-based fees.