India's IT Industry Exported US$221.4 Billion of Software Services in 2025-26 and Nasscom Counts 59.5 Lakh Workers, 58 Years After Tata Consultancy Services Was Founded in 1968

The Reserve Bank of India’s survey of software exports, released on 18 September 2026, puts India’s software services exports at US$221.4 billion in 2025-26, up 8.2 per cent on the year before. Computer services made up US$153.4 billion of that. IT-enabled services made up the other US$68.0 billion, of which business process outsourcing (customer support, back-office processing and similar work that companies hand to outside firms) was US$56.0 billion and engineering services US$12.0 billion. The United States bought 54.1 per cent of the total and Europe 31.8 per cent, with the United Kingdom the largest European market.

Nasscom, the industry body for software and services firms, publishes a wider figure. Its Annual Strategic Review, released on 24 February 2026, estimated the technology industry’s 2025-26 revenue at US$315 billion, up 6.1 per cent from US$297 billion, and its export revenue at US$246 billion. The two measures differ. The Reserve Bank counts software services exports and leaves out sales made through foreign affiliates; with those added, its total is US$239.3 billion, up 9.5 per cent. Nasscom’s numbers cover the whole industry, which it splits into IT services (US$149 billion), engineering research and development (US$63 billion), business process management (US$59 billion), software products (US$23 billion) and hardware (US$21 billion). India’s fiscal year runs from 1 April to 31 March, so 2025-26 closed on 31 March 2026. Total goods and services exports for the year are in our piece on India’s record exports in 2025-26.

A Tata division, a Mumbai export zone and a Burroughs contract

Tata Consultancy Services dates itself to 1968. Its own timeline lists early work in bank reconciliation, payroll and accounting for Indian companies, some of them inside the Tata group. The timeline gives 1971 for a project for an electric company in Iran, its first overseas assignment, and 1973 for a partnership with Burroughs, an American computer maker, to sell and service its systems in India and write software for its machines worldwide. The same timeline records the first offshore project from India that year, for a hospital in Detroit, and a financial accounting system for a UK housing society in 1974, delivered on Burroughs’ behalf.

Other accounts of the early projects differ. Dataquest India’s 2002 history says that in 1973 and 1974 TCS delivered a stores and inventory control system for an Iranian electricity generation unit and, with Burroughs, a hospital information system in the UK. Dinesh Sharma, in his 2008 book The Long Revolution, quotes F. C. Kohli, who was succeeded as TCS chief executive by S. Ramadorai in 1996, on how the Burroughs work started in the early 1970s: “you needed somebody to test you out,” Kohli says, and Burroughs could do that. TCS’s timeline records that it crossed US$1 million in revenue in 1976.

Santa Cruz Electronics Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ) in Mumbai was set up on 1 May 1973 as a zone solely for making and exporting electronic items, according to SEEPZ’s own tender document. India had set up Asia’s first export processing zone at Kandla in 1965, the same document says. SEEPZ became a special economic zone in November 2000, and the document lists 66 IT software units among its 295 exporters.

Dataquest India reports that around 1981 and 1982 about 30 companies were registered as software exporters, most of them operating out of SEEPZ, and that TCS and Tata Burroughs together accounted for 67 per cent of all exports.

Body shopping, two policies and Infosys in Pune

Indian software firms of the 1970s and 1980s lacked their own computers and tools, so they sent engineers to the customer’s site and worked on the customer’s machines. Sharma writes that the industry called this model body shopping, and that TCS and Tata Burroughs (renamed Tata Unysis in 1986) accounted for nearly 70 per cent of exports done this way. The contracts ran 6 to 18 months and were mostly routine coding, debugging and data conversion, and they made up 70 to 80 per cent of export revenue. Sharma cites a 1994 World Bank study that found the model did little to expand the domestic pool of knowledge.

The market shifted after the computer policy of 1984 and the software policy of 1986. Imports of hardware and software were liberalised, software was brought under the Open General Licence, and companies began to try remote development from India, though telecom costs stayed high. Citibank set up a software unit at SEEPZ in 1984 with Rs 2 crore of capital spending, and the unit, Citicorp Overseas Software Limited, was inaugurated on 28 October 1985. In 1989-90 it was the third-largest software exporter behind TCS and Tata Unysis, earning Rs 9 crore against Tata Unysis’s Rs 29 crore, Sharma writes.

Infosys was incorporated on 2 July 1981 in Pune as Infosys Consultants Private Limited, its annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission says. Business Today reports that seven engineers from Patni Computer Systems started it with Rs 10,000 that N. R. Narayana Murthy borrowed from his wife. The company took the name Infosys Technologies Limited in June 1992 when it became a public company. It made an initial public offering in India in February 1993, raising about US$4.4 million, and was listed on Indian stock exchanges in June 1993. Its US offering of American Depositary Shares followed in 1999, and it is headquartered in Bengaluru.

The 1991 reforms and the Software Technology Parks

On 24 July 1991 the government published an industrial policy that ended licensing for all but 18 industries; the documents are set out in our piece on the 1991 reforms. Software had its own scheme that year. Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) says it was established and registered as an autonomous society on 5 June 1991, after three parks had been set up in 1990 as separate societies at Pune, Bengaluru and Bhubaneswar and merged. The scheme is described as “a 100 percent export oriented scheme” for developing and exporting computer software, and each centre was equipped with its own earth station for data links. STPI now sits under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

Sharma writes that the real breakthrough in software exports came after 1991, with the park scheme. The figures for the starting point differ by source. Dataquest India’s 2002 history gives software exports of US$128 million in 1990-91, against US$4.4 million in 1979. Sharma gives a rise from about Rs 10 crore to Rs 100 crore by 1991. The two sources do not agree on the starting point.

Y2K and the export figure that followed

TCS’s timeline lists 1997 as the year it took part in the Y2K work, the repair of date fields in old software before the year 2000. Nasscom’s figures, reported by domain-b on 20 August 1999, put India’s software exports in 1998-99 at Rs 10,940 crore (US$2.65 billion), against Rs 6,530 crore (US$1.75 billion) a year earlier, an increase of 68 per cent in rupees. Y2K work accounted for about 20 per cent of those exports, or US$560 million, the same report says. Nasscom expected 1999-2000 exports to grow by more than 50 per cent, to Rs 16,700 crore.

Tech Monitor reported on 14 June 1999 that Nasscom projected exports in 1999-2000 at just under US$4 billion and expected Y2K revenue to fall to a few hundred million dollars in 2000. Dataquest India’s 2002 retrospective says exports grew on the strength of Y2K work and kept growing after it.

59.5 lakh people, and the estimates behind them

Nasscom’s review puts direct employment in the industry at 59.5 lakh (5.95 million) at the end of 2025-26, up from 58.15 lakh a year earlier, according to the Press Trust of India’s report of the release. Net additions were 1.35 lakh in 2025-26 and 1.33 lakh in 2024-25. Nasscom’s release says headcount rose 2.3 per cent and that the industry remained a net hirer, while revenue rose 6.1 per cent. Nasscom President Rajesh Nambiar, as PTI reports, said job growth lagged revenue growth and that he was satisfied the industry remains a net employer.

The figures carry limits. Nasscom published them on 24 February 2026, five weeks before the fiscal year closed, and marks the 2025-26 numbers as estimates. It has revised before: PTI reports that the 2024-25 revenue base moved from US$282.6 billion to US$297 billion in the same review. The Reserve Bank’s survey drew replies from 2,363 of the 7,569 companies it contacted, and those respondents cover about 89 per cent of its estimated software services exports.

Global capability centres

A global capability centre, or GCC, is a unit that a company based abroad runs in India to do its own technology, engineering or back-office work. Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on 6 August 2025, citing Nasscom data, that more than 1,700 GCCs were operating in India and employing more than 19 lakh people. Their revenue had grown from US$40.4 billion in FY19 to US$64.6 billion in FY24, a compound annual growth rate of 9.8 per cent.

The Nasscom-Zinnov GCC Landscape Report, published in May 2026, counts 2,117 GCCs in India running 3,728 units, with 2.36 million professionals and US$98.4 billion of revenue, all labelled FY26E, an estimate for the year. Its foreword says more than 500 new GCCs and over 1,000 units were set up in the past five years, and the report’s publishers list 506 Forbes Global 2000 companies among those with a GCC in India. The two counts are two years apart, FY24 in the parliamentary reply and FY26E in the report. Nasscom’s February 2026 release names GCCs and engineering research and development as the industry’s growth engines.

What Nasscom says about AI and skilling

The same release estimates AI revenue at upwards of US$10 billion to US$12 billion for 2025-26 and says more than 2 million professionals had been upskilled in AI, of whom 200,000 to 300,000 were trained in advanced AI skills. Nasscom Chairperson Sindhu Gangadharan said “AI is accelerating productivity and changing the nature of work,” and described the industry’s focus as building teams of people and AI, continued skilling, and turning efficiency gains into new jobs. The government’s side of AI skilling, the FutureSkills pillar of the IndiaAI Mission, is covered in our piece on the mission’s GPUs, models and money.

The release also reports Nasscom’s Global End User CXO Survey of senior executives at technology-buying companies worldwide. In it, 86 per cent expect business demand to stay stable or rise in calendar 2026, and 90 per cent say they are raising the AI share of their digital budgets.