how the tech boom is killing India’s best coders

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1:02Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again, more Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHART's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHART. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? You hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind games. A new podcast exploring NLP. AKA neuro-linguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle? A shady hypnosis scam? Or both? Listen to mind games on the IHART radio app. Apple podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:07Hey, it's Dexter. Before we get into today's episode, just a heads up that we're going to be talking about suicide. So if that's not something you're comfortable hearing about, no worries, and we'll catch one the next one. Nikhil was a star student. His parents are farmers. And comes from a humble family. In fact, when he landed a job at Ola Krutrin, which is a high profile AI company, banners went up in his village, because nobody had gone as far as he had in that village. But then he started working at the company and he realized that the work culture is not what he expected. Parth MN is an independent journalist who recently wrote a piece for the publication Rest of World. And the title of that article is, Death of an Indian Tech worker. It's about Nikhil Samwanchi, a 24-year-old machine learning engineer and Bangalore, a city that some people have nicknamed India's Silicon Valley. His family members told me that he had started working 15 hours a day.

3:07His manager was kind of abrasive, which was not something he was used to. He was a very soft spoken polite sort of a guy. When he had come home for a couple of weeks, he had met his close friend, they caught up. And he basically told him that he's feeling a little lonely in Bangalore and he was considering a move back. But his family and the friend I spoke to said that it was not easy for him to come back and just abandon the job that had brought so much pride to his parents. It would have spread a bit of negativity around him in the village and he would have thought that I've made my parents proud. I can't just leave that and come back. And one evening, he sent a message to his roommate, which I tell my family it was an accident. A few hours later, his body was found in a lake in Bangalore. Tell my family that it was an accident. Yeah. Nikhil was someone that people looked up to.

4:07This is a young man from a tiny village who got out and got himself a job at a respected big company. What happened to him there is a really long story and a really sad story. But it's not a unique story. Post-reporting shows that there is an increasing trend of people leaving poor upbringings only to go die in the big city. And the connection is India's tech industry. From Colitiscope and I Heart Podcasts. This is Kill Switch. It's Commencement. I'm Dr. Thomas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

5:10Bye. India has always had a suicide problem. In fact, suicide rate is more than the global rate. But some of the suicides that have happened in India are largely suicides of farmers. India's farmers have been an international news for the past few years. Back in 2020, farmers and unions representing over 250 million people staged the largest protest in recorded human history. You might have seen some of the footage of this of farmers driving tractors from Northern India down to Delhi demonstrating against proposed laws that they said would make it impossible for them to make a living. More than half of India's population relies on agriculture for the livelihood and things have gotten so bad economically that people are getting desperate. Part has been reporting on this topic for over a decade. Farmers have been dying by suicide, especially since the 1990s. In huge numbers between 1995 to 2015, more than 300,000 farmers have died by suicide in India.

6:13The Indian government has stopped counting side-data fudging of farmers' suicides because the numbers started looking really bad. But the trend has only worsened. Stopped counting. Yeah, they're bearing bodies in other columns, basically. So there are certain states that will show no farm suicides. But other suicides, quote-unquote, other suicides would have shot through the roof. But the farmers are not the only profession that is struggling right now. It's also build over into the white-collar jobs. Part's reporting takes him to rural villages across India, talking to people who live there about the pressures they're dealing with that lead to this increase in suicides. But recently he's been noticing another trend outside of the villages and instead in the big cities, specifically in India's tech hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Or rather, he's been noticing the same trend just in a different demographic. Suicides among white-collar tech workers. Over the past few years, as someone who follows news in India,

7:14you keep coming across stories of tech workers' suicides. And these are isolated suicides. And then there are maybe Twitter threads, and Twitter hashtags that follow for a couple of days. And then it goes quiet for a few more days until there's another suicide. So we've been seeing quite a few of them over the past few years. In fact, when we analyzed the newspaper reports, we found there were 227 tech workers' suicides in the last eight or nine years. And that's a fairly big number. India doesn't maintain data for IT workers' suicides specifically. But the last recorded number for white-collar workers is 10% of the suicides that have happened in India. For years in India, the tech industry has been thought of as a path out of the village, getting out of the farming village, going to a big city, getting into the tech industry, that's the dream for a lot of people. And for a poor person, a tech job in Bangalore could lift your entire family out of poverty. But parts reporting is finding that, instead,

8:16these workers are essentially going to the big cities and dying there. Some of the stories that you come across in newspapers, you see tech workers' suicides in, say, IT hubs of Bangalore or Pune or Hyderabad. But when you look at some of the people who have died by suicides, they are not from Bangalore or Hyderabad or Pune. They come from marginalized families, farming families, you know, working-class families. And they are sort of looking to uplift themselves and their families, bring their families out of financial trouble and basically breaking their back over it. For Nicholas to watch, this was the game plan. Since he was a young boy, his family did everything they could to get Nicholas educated so that he could have the opportunities that they never had. His parents had to sell a portion of their farmland and their house to get his son and his elder sister educated. In fact, when he was nine years old or ten years old,

9:16his father enrolled him in a school which was 40 minutes away from his village because it was an English-medium instruction village. And that's something that they wanted him to study in and cultivate, actually, if he had to go out and do something that they couldn't do. So the parents worked really hard, very humble family. He worked really hard to get where he had gotten. When Nickel landed a job at an AI infrastructure company called Ola Krutram, it was a really big deal. He'd made it. What does it mean for a kid from a rural village to go out and make it in a place like Bangalore? It's a huge deal. His first salary was ten times more than what his parents earned from farming. So you can imagine what a huge deal it was for his parents and villages are generally a tight-knit community. So when someone from the village does well, the entire village sort of celebrates. And he does mean celebrating. People back home in Nickel's village

10:16put up banners all over town to show how proud of them they were. But less than a year later, Nickel would take his own life. Not even the police seem to have any real answers. But the story of Nickel's death shows us a lot about India's tech industry and about how people in other countries, including the United States, are influencing that toxic work culture. That's after the break. This episode is sponsored by headshop.com. Looking for your next go-to smoke shop? Headshop.com has you covered. Headshop.com is the online smoke shop trusted by over 100,000 happy customers and they've got everything in one place. Dab rigs, vaporizers, glass bongs, smoking pipes, plus THC flour, gummies, and drinks. And right now at headshop.com, the more you buy, the more you save. Get up to 30% off THC flour,

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12:16What if mind control is real? If you get control of behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts

13:18or wherever you get your podcasts. What is the work culture like right now in the tech industry in India? It's quite toxic having spoken to a bunch of IT professionals. 83% of them say they're burnt out. And one in four, like 25% clock, 70 hours a week, which is a lot. And even then you have some titans of the industry saying there should be 80 hours and 90 hours work week. This is a trend amongst tech companies in India. The founder of one company says that he expects a 70 hour work week. The chairman of another says he wants 90 hour work weeks. The founder of the company that Nickel work for refers to the concept of work-life balance as a Western import. I don't agree with this work-life balance concept. I think that's an outcome of a western thought process of a post-industrial era. But our... Interesting. Are you thought this was never that? That's Babish Agraval, the CEO of Ola,

14:18on a podcast in the summer of 2024. On that same show, he said, quote, I have a strong belief that one generation will have to do penance so that we can build the number one country in the world, the largest economy. In quote. I mean, one tech worker told me that he's worked through the night at some point in his job, got home at 630 and still reported back at 1030. Geez. There was one tech worker who told me that these longards make sure that he has very little time for his family, his health, he started seeing a psychologist because he is no longer in the right stream of mind. One tech worker told me that there's obviously regular unpaid overtime that they have to do. And beyond a stress in psychological pressure, this culture is also having physical effects on the workers in Karnataka. That's the state in India, that's home to Bangalore. Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India. And in Karnataka, you have a lot of patients looking for organ donations and organ transplants

15:18and a lot of them are tech workers. In the IT Hub of Hyderabad, there was a survey and study which came out recently. It said that about 84% of tech workers struggled with fatty liver disease which is associated with stress and longards of sedentary work. They're overworked, they're overwhelmed, and they have very little time for themselves and their families. For someone like Nichol Swanshi, the stresses of his new job were on top of the fact that he was already living in a place that was culturally and even linguistically different from where he grew up. In his village, he spoke Marathi, which is his native language, his mother tongue, something I speak as well. In Bangalore, nobody speaks Marathi. He had to have been engaging with people in English, something that he was fine with because he had learnt in an English medium school. But still, that change matters. And when you don't have anybody around you, it becomes difficult to settle down in an unfamiliar territory, right? And at a time like that,

16:18when you have a workplace that kind of toxic and abrasive, it makes it even more difficult. But according to Parth's conversation with family and friends, Nichol never let it show. He knew people back home were depending on him. I think one of the biggest things is the responsibility, right? Because parents, even though it, even the parents or families may not say that to their kids that we are looking at you for financial security. The kids are mature enough to understand that their parents are not earning a lot of money. The kids are mature enough to understand that the parents have sacrificed a lot to make sure that they get educated. And so there's a lot of pressure to the field. And it is not easy in a country like India, which is inherently a labor surplus economy. There are far too many people and far too few jobs. And so when you land a job, it becomes very difficult to walk away from it because you don't know what the future holds. Right. And someone like Nichol,

17:18who came from the family that you did, who came from the village of not Maharashtra and did not have financial security. We would have felt that pressure ten times more than like someone like I would have felt who's born and raised in Mumbai. And I don't have the kind of financial responsibilities that Nichol has. So I can maybe take a lot more chances and Nichol couldn't afford to take any chances. Parth has come across a lot of stories like this. Highly educated college graduates who get stuck in a toxic work environment. But feel like they can't leave because they have to revive for their family back home. Or increasingly, people who can't find work at all because there are too many people competing for too few jobs. I read a recent report in economic times, which said that in this current financial year, the top five IT companies in India have added a net 17 employees, one seven employees. Whereas last year, it was 17,000. So there's a hiring

18:19freeze as well. I'm sorry. Can you say that number again? You said 17. One seven? Yes. Top IT firms added just 17 staff in nine months. And hiring has nearly frozen. One seven, 17 total buyers across all those companies. This is an economic times report I have in front of me right now. And I met a family of a 20-year-old tech graduate who was looking for a job, who had been looking for a job for months. He had made a CV. Again, came from a small town. His father had passed away. His mother, and his grandmother had taught him up by running an iron shop. They would press people's clothes and work as domestic help. And that's how they had raised this boy. He would have also felt the responsibility to bring his mother and grandmother some sort of financial stability. He was one of the brighter students, but he couldn't get a job for months. He ran from one place to another. Asked a lot of people about it.

19:20Eventually, he also died by suicide. And I met his mother. I met his elder brother. And his elder brother told me that I'm not as intelligent as him. And we all thought that he would go places. And now, we miss him all the time. Because he ended his life abruptly out of depression and just feeling worthless. Because he was worth so much and he wasn't getting anything. His mother made a very hard-tracking point when I spoke to her. She said that in a great making sure that my son got educated. Because if he had not studied, he wouldn't have had those ambitions. Wow. And because he couldn't complete those ambitions, he ended up dying by suicide. There are so many people out there who were not educated. They work as laborers. They make 10,000 rupees a month, 5,000 rupees a month. Wow. And they don't have the ambition of working in a big office. And he had the ambition because he knew he was worth a lot more. And because he couldn't, he felt short of that ambition. He went into depression

20:20and ended up killing himself. And there was one of the most hard-tracking conversations I've had as a reporter. This wasn't always the case. From the 90s to the early 2000s, tech employees were in demand in big cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad. And the jobs were good jobs. Fair hours, good salaries, and a chance to build a good life for yourself. It could work 8 hours, help their families, give them time, build a house, pay the family, and still make a decent living. That is no longer possible. 2010, 11 onwards, it started getting increasingly competitive. There was this one CEO, I spoke to. He said that in the early 2000s, the tech industry was growing at a source-caarching pace. As the industry got more and more competitive, companies started making more and more competitive demands. And then that sort of changed the nature of the industry. And over the past, I think five years, especially six years,

21:20especially since the pandemic, that work culture has become even more toxic. Work from home, blurred the boundaries between personal space and officers, and workers became considerable sort of 24 hours a day. The main driver of the Indian tech economy is outsourced work. At one point, this meant call centers. Now, it's morphed into housing specialists for all kinds of technology needs. This kind of work already requires Indian companies to provide services around the clock, in order to service the rest of the world. And the companies pass those 24 hour obligations onto their employees. So this culture is encouraged by the CEOs of some of these companies, but the pressure that turns the gears of that culture machine isn't just coming from the few executives. It's coming from outside. To be more specific, it's also coming from the United States. I think a lot of people say from the States when they think of the tech industry in India,

22:20I think they think of a couple of things. The first would be outsourcing, or they would think of call centers. I think another thing that people might think of is people who immigrate from India and work in Silicon Valley. But your reporting is showing that that's also changing and putting a lot of pressure on workers also, right? So there are three things you just alluded to. One is the call centers, which are getting more and more automated because of AI. So a lot of those jobs have gone away. Secondly, outsourcing, which is the backbone of India's tech industry. I think around 62% of India's tech revenue is driven by US. outsourcing remains India's backbone. And that is why experts have told me that it remains more vulnerable to AI disruption. Traditional product development companies won't be as affected as much as traditional outsourcing companies. So a lot of these jobs are endangered. And many of the workers also see it coming. One IT worker basically told me

23:20that a lot of the mid-level managers are being laid off. And when that happens, they're not being replaced. Their work invariably falls until employees below them. And the last thing you spoke about is the immigrant population in the US. And that is the Donald Trump hiking fees recently. And the entire campaign around make America great again, anti-migration sort of campaign. So President signing a proclamation that now requires this $100,000 annual fee for this H-1B visa for highly skilled foreign workers. Now this could be a huge blow to big tech firms that rely heavily on highly skilled foreign workers to fill key roles. Historically, the H-1B visa program had been a path for Indian tech workers to move to the US. And it was a win-win. Immigrant workers get a high paying American job and their employers, the US tech companies, really liked having this extra source of foreign talent. But now the Trump administration has astronomically raised the fees for those visas.

24:20And American companies can't afford to hire them anymore. So a lot of Indian workers who otherwise might have gone to the US are staying in India. And the competing for the very few jobs that are available at home. They're getting thrown back into that pressure cooker where the work culture is terrible, the hours are extreme, and the jobs that are available are on the AI chopping block. Basically, the tech workforce in India is being squeezed from every side. And if somebody pushes back, they are basically told to fit the job and they can be easily replaced by somebody else because there are hundreds of people waiting in the wings. So that's the situation of tech workers in India. They're sort of trapped. They have nowhere else to go. And when the odds are stacked so much against you, you can't really push for better conditions. You can't really push back for paid overtime and so on and so forth, because the company is clearly hold all the chips. After the break, India's union leaders get into the streets to fight back against the tech industry.

25:21But will it work? Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHART's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHART can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think IHART. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

26:22Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. What if mind control is real? If you get control of behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neuro-enguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work.

27:22This is wild. Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you struggle with bloating gas, constipation, digestive issues, yeast overgrowth, well, you may already know about digest this. It's the podcast hosted by me, Bethany Cameron, also known as Little Sipper on Instagram. I dive in to gut health nutrition, the food industry, and drawing from my own experience. I break down what's good, what's bad, and what's the best for your gut, your skin, and so much more. I even offer gut-friendly recipes. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday produced by Wellness Loud. What are employees even able to do in these situations? Because it sounds like even just from reading your articles, so many that people are anonymous, is it that people are afraid to speak up? Absolutely. Most of the employees are afraid to speak up.

28:22They are scared for their jobs, because if they are coated in my piece and their employer reads it, they're done. Not only will they lose their job from that employer, they will not get a job anywhere in the industry. Other employers will also find excuses to not employ those people. So they are petrified. They have very few legal protections. The cases basically drag on for years. So by the time you get any kind of justice, decades have passed. And so there's very little one can do. So a lot of people flatly refuse to speak to me. And the ones who agreed I had to go through some people who already knew me and they could sort of assure them that this person is a legitimate credible journalist who won't disclose your identity. And that's when they agreed to speak to me. A lot of family members were reluctant to speak to me. Because many union leaders told me that they're afraid. Many of them basically sign non-disclosure agreements with the companies. Many of them get paid by the companies

29:23through a life insurance policy. According to union leaders, these companies will use corporate insurance policies to compensate the families of the suicide victims. Their compensation comes with a catch. And then they're also worried about defamation. The company might drag them to court. And they don't want to get into that. And they don't have the power to sort of take on a company. So many of the families who had lost their loved ones to suicide due to toxic culture. They didn't come forward and speak to me. Even Nikhil's family, his parents didn't speak to me about the companies. They said, we don't want to talk about the company. We want to, we'll only speak to you on condition of that that we speak about my son. And I'd like to remember him. His parents basically said, we don't want to talk about the company. And that basically tells you how and why these huge multinational companies have been able to get away with this kind of toxic work culture. In response to Nikhil's death, Ola of the company, released a statement saying

30:23that they will quote deeply saddened. With each death, companies put out similar statements. But not all workers are keeping quiet about this. Last year, about 700 tech workers staged a protest in the streets of Bangalore. One of their demands was that labor laws actually be enforced. This is bold and we got to acknowledge that. But part of it says that we have to keep that protest and perspective. They do protest. They have taken to streets. But the IT industry employs around five million people in India and some 30,000 are part of the union. So they are doing what they can in their own way, in their own city. Five million versus 30,000. Yeah. So, you know, 30,000 people who are part of these unions, it's not a large number. And then they cannot pressurize the employers to make changes in the way they work. Yeah. I mean, that's not even 1%. Yeah. So the union leaders that I spoke to, they are doing their best to mobilize.

31:25They are doing their best to pressurize state governments into bringing some change. But because the numbers are lacking, they're not able to put the kind of pressure. And obviously the labor laws in India are easily bypassed. The labor codes in India are not very pro worker. So they are sort of squeezed from every direction. So how do these companies respond? The company that I have reported on refused to comment. There was another case that I have referenced to. They didn't want to comment on that either. I reached out to NASCOM, which is India's top IT body, which represents the IT company's interests. They gave a statement about AI and how they see AI reshaping jobs and so on and so forth. But they didn't speak about the allegations of toxic work culture. They refused to speak about this usage. Whenever a suicide happens, they release a sort of a, the usual statement about being silent by the loss. And then we are cooperating with the authorities.

32:26And we're helping the family. We are doing our best to create a healthy workplace for our employees and so on and so forth. So they release that customary statement. And that's about it. Even when I spoke to some of the union leaders, they made a good point. They said that even the police and the lawyer out of machinery is unable or unwilling to bring these companies to book. Because the state is then losing revenue if the company moves to another state. So a lot of the state government authorities, they're also unwilling to take on the large companies whenever a suicide happens. So it is very easy for the authorities to say that it could have been personal. But the fact of the matter is if work culture is contributing to that stress, then it deserves to be investigated. Nobody is saying that it was the only cause for suicide. Whenever tech worker dies by suicide, surely there could be personal reasons. But if a toxic work culture, if that work stress is contributing,

33:27is a contributing factor, then it deserves to be investigated. When I first read Parts article, in addition to being shocked at all the horrible details, I was also kind of ashamed that I didn't know about this thing that probably everyone in India is talking about, right? Well, actually, no. Parts says that a lot of people in India don't necessarily realize how widespread this is. It's not that people don't care or that the public isn't paying attention. It's that there are important details that the news isn't usually telling them. There was one thing that I found while reporting this story was that when I looked at the densities by suicide of IT workers, most of the news reports did not mention the company they worked in. And that's so telling. It's one of the basic things that you have to do as a reporter, as a newspaper. When you mentioned someone has died by suicide in one company, in one city, why can't you mention the name of that company? And many of those. Right. And the name of that company, because it would invite bad pressure,

34:28because it would invite bad reputation, the name of that company is invisibilized in many of these news reports. And then when I had to dig further, I had to call the union leaders and then I had to ask them, you know, this is a report I found but I don't know what company they were working in. Then they sort of, you know, call them, call their contacts and they found out which company the suicide happened in. I mean, this is something you want to know as a potential worker. If I'm applying to somewhere and I'm finding out that this is happening to the workers, there's probably something wrong at that company. I want to know that. Exactly. Exactly. Many of these news reports do not mention the company. And that just tells you how even the media is not entirely pro-worker and how they are sort of trying to protect the employers. And it's actually not a surprise when you look at the way the Law and Order machinery operates, when you look at the way the media operates, it is not a surprise that the tech companies are able to get away with this toxic work culture.

35:31This phrase or the idea that one generation has to pay a penance for India to become the number one country in the world or for India to move forward. This is something we've seen before, right? The kind of work culture that people talk about in Korea, the kind of work culture that people talk about in Japan, sometimes the kind of work culture that people talk about in China, sometimes, you know, I think a lot of times we make this mistake of thinking, oh, there must be something ingrained in the cultural values. It's rapid economic development, which is the underlying pattern here. It's very strange to see the idea of penance being introduced and that, hey, we're just going to have to pay the price for a generation. Okay, who is we? Yeah, exactly. When you talk about rapid economic development, you have to ask who's development. Right. Right? Because the person calling for penance has a network of over a billion dollars

36:31and the people who are supposed to be paying though that penance are dying by suicide, they're struggling to make their rent. And there's something that I've always wondered when we talk about this rising GDP of India and India becoming the third largest of fourth largest economy. And we are adding more and more billionaires, but at the same time, 63 million people enter poverty because they don't have access to public health care. There was a study recently that was quite revealing. Even the top 5 percent of income earners in Mumbai would need a staggering 109 years to afford a home. Even globally, house price to income ratio of 3x to 6x is considered healthy. And anything about 10x is typically flagged as sort of it's a warning sign, because it's unaffordable. And by that sort of metric, Indian metros are horrible. The HPI ratio in Mumbai is 34x in Bangalore is 22x.

37:31And education has gotten more and more expensive. Health care has gotten more and more expensive. So even if from the outside, it looks like you're making a decent sort of income. You're still living paycheck to paycheck. You can say that of course India has become the fourth largest economy. But what about the per capita income? What is happening if the top 1% owns 40% of the country's wealth? Then of course the GDP might look like it is India is the fourth largest economy in the world. But the fact of the matter is, people are struggling to pay their rent. And 90% of people are making less than $300 a month. So when you talk about rapid economic development, it is generally the development of the developed. And not the development of the working class and the poor and the marginalized. What you're describing here is I think something that a lot of listeners will know something about cost rising isn't anything that's foreign. But you're describing a much more extreme version of this. And you're describing it in a region where a lot of people depend on.

38:33Yeah. Because of exactly what you're talking about, you're talking about outsourcing, you're talking about how much of the world actually does depend on labor in the tech sector that is happening in India. And they may not realize how precarious that is. I hope this story becomes a bit of a reality check for the global tech industry, which India is an integral part of. I want to make sure that the tech industry, which is sort of, you know, it's worth $280 billion. It employs 5 million people. And it's got this glittering numbers. There has to be some reality check. There has to be some sense of, you know, that facade has to be broken. What I got from reading parts reporting and from talking to them is that maybe sometimes when I read about explosive growth in some market overseas, so maybe stop and ask questions about whose back that growth is built on.

39:34Valuations and stock prices and market ratios can only tell you so much. Under all those numbers are people, like Nicole and his family. I met his family. They were completely shattered. His father was in tears. His mother had stopped eating. She had become frail. She had to go to the hospital a couple of times. It was a very heartbreaking situation when I interviewed them and I met them. His father, in fact, told me that there's a photograph of Nicole in their house. And they have put a sort of a blanket on top of that photograph because when they see him, they miss him. So they can't even bear to see his face on that photograph without really breaking down. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Kill Switch. If you want to talk to us, you can email us at KillSwitch at Kalataskoke.nyc

40:34or on Instagram or at KillSwitchPod. And if you find this stuff interesting or valuable, maybe leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did you know that KillSwitch is on YouTube? And the link for that and everything else you need to know is in the show notes. KillSwitch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shino Ozaki, Darlock Pots, and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdock and Kyle also makes the show. From Kalataskoke, our Executive Producers are Ozwo Lashin, Mangesh Hatikador, and Kate Ozborn. From I Heart, our Executive Producers are Katrina Norval, and Nikki E. Tor. Catch you on the next one. Most people know American Express is for our iconic personal cards. Some know us for our business cards to help entrepreneurs grow, but American Express also offers

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