Gaurav Pradhan Gurukul 🇮🇳

On my previous post, someone I call a “Tech Coolie” commented: “If all white-collar jobs disappear, who will buy tourism, real estate, etc.?” Then came the masterpiece: “The IT industry runs this country. It is our blood and sweat that built this country.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly why I use the term Tech Coolie. Not for people who work in technology. I have enormous respect for technology professionals who understand the larger economy. I use it for those trapped in a frog-in-the-well mindset—people who have spent so long inside the IT bubble that they have started believing the bubble is India. SOME PERSPECTIVE India's IT-BPM industry is estimated at roughly $315 billion in annual revenue. India's nominal GDP is roughly $4.15 trillion. Even if you make the simplistic comparison of revenue with GDP, $315 billion is only about 7.6% of $4.15 trillion. And technically, the comparison itself exaggerates IT's economic contribution because industry revenue is not the same thing as contribution to GDP. GDP measures value added. Yet somehow the argument becomes: “IT runs India.” Really? Who builds the roads your cab drives on? Who produces the food delivered to your apartment? Who manufactures the cars, medicines, steel, cement and machinery? Who constructs the airports, houses, hotels and factories? Who runs agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, banking, healthcare, construction, energy, defence, retail, hospitality and millions of MSMEs? And here is the biggest irony: Who is the IT industry ultimately serving? Banks. Factories. Retailers. Airlines. Hotels. Governments. Manufacturers. Healthcare companies. Telecom companies. Consumers. Technology is an enormously important enabler of the economy. It is not the economy itself. Yes, India's IT revolution created millions of jobs, generated enormous exports, built global credibility and transformed India's middle class. Be proud of that. But believing that “our blood and sweat built this country” while casually ignoring farmers, factory workers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, construction workers, truck drivers, doctors, teachers and hundreds of millions of other Indians isn't confidence. It is occupational narcissism. And the first comment reveals the same bubble: “If white-collar jobs disappear, who will buy tourism and real estate?” Apparently, in this worldview, 1.4 billion Indians exist primarily to sell houses, holidays and services to software engineers. That is not economics. That is a frog sitting inside a corporate cubicle and mistaking the walls of his well for the boundaries of Bharat. Technology is powerful. Technology professionals are valuable. But Bharat was not built by one industry—and Bharat will not stop because one industry changes. The coming AI disruption will not make technology irrelevant. It will simply separate the people who use technology to create value from those who believed that merely having a technology job was the value. That is the difference between a Tech Leader and a Tech Coolie.