Five cos on hiring drive for every four firing staff

The economic downturn may have led to heavy job losses in many sectors, but the situation perhaps isn't that gloomy when looking at all the industries together as an average of five companies expanded their workforce for every four cutting down on their staff size.

An analysis of regulatory disclosures about workforces made by companies in India shows that more than half of them hired employees- some in thousands and many in hundreds- even as many others pruned their employee-strength last fiscal.

Out of close to 450 companies for whom employee figures are available for the past two fiscals, the workforce grew for nearly 250 firms, according to an analysis of workforce details compiled by financial data provider Capitalline, which tracks these details from annual reports and other regulatory filings by the companies for their financials.

Together, these companies added more than 1.5 lakh employees during the latest financial year to their workforce, representing a growth of about 7 per cent from about 19.7 lakh in the previous fiscal.

However, this analysis does not take into account the changes in workforce in the current fiscal year which began in April 2009 for a majority of the companies and in January this year for some. There have been reports that many job losses have occurred in the current fiscal year also and these are not reflected in this analysis.