Reigning as one of the top cities for job opportunities driven by its booming IT sector and an influx of lakhs of youth every year, Hyderabad finds itself at the centre of entrepreneurial emergence. According to the Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2024, the city has over 650 startups, representing 6% of the country’s startups and is the 4th best startup ecosystem in the country. However, despite its widely-recognised reputation as a city that promotes and facilitates the establishment of new ventures cutting across fields as well as welcomes ambitious job seekers from across the country, young employees in the city report various structural issues such as job insecurity, excessive workload, unstable and dysfunctional work ethic, perfunctory grievance redressal systems and overall ‘toxicity’ prevailing over the workspace.
Anshu Bhingradia (25), who worked as a Graphic Designer and 3D animator at an FMCG brand based in Banjara Hills says that he was sacked within four months of joining the company in 2023 and still has not been paid for the last month. “I had to use my own device for office work, which eventually broke down due to the heavy workload. It cost me a lakh to recover the data and repair my device without any assistance from the company.
Despite all of this, I was laid off within four months for no specified reason. I have still not been given a month’s pay while working overtime almost every day. The company refuses to communicate and settle the matter,” .