Bengaluru-based edtech unicorn Vedantu has laid off 385 employees in its fourth round of layoffs this year. Prior to this, the Indian start-up fired 100 full-time staff from its sales team in July and 624 permanent and contractual workers in May. In total, the company laid off 1100 employees this year. 

Vedantu took the harsh measure to keep its business on the profitability track amid a global economic downturn. Apart from terminating the employees, the founders and senior executives of the enterprise have decided to take a 50 per cent pay cut. 

The Indian edtech sector has been going through a rough patch. In October, India's highly-valued edtech platform Byju's announced its plans to rationalise the workforce in a phased manner, which suggested a possible termination of 2,500 employees from its 50,000-strong employee bandwidth. Last month, Unacademy also announced it would cut 350 jobs. In April the unicorn sacked 1100 workers. 

A Moneycontrol report pointed out that since the beginning of 2022, around 18,000 employees have lost their jobs in the tech space. The start-ups have been struggling to generate funds at a proper valuation and taking hard lines to combat the financial crisis. 

Considering the present scenario, tech experts are anxious that the coming year will bring more hardships in the tech sector than the present one. In his tweet, Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal wrote that 2023 could be more difficult than 2022.

Global situations are also similar to India. After the takeover, Elon Musk-led Twitter laid off nearly 7,500 employees. Meta also terminated contracts of around 13 per cent of its entire workforce. Other tech giants such as Microsoft and Walmart also followed the same path.