This, in turn, has fuelled demand for apartments, cars and restaurants across top-tier cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram over the past 30 years. The Nifty IT index of 10 of the country's biggest software companies is down some 20% this year, wiping out tens of billions of dollars in investor money. According to Infosys, generative AI might displace 92 million jobs such as front-end developers and testers, but it will create some 170 million new jobs for data annotators, AI engineers and AI leads. According to India's software lobbying group Nasscom, the industry has begun embracing these shifts, with 2025 marking a pivot when the tech industry moved decisively from AI experimentation to actual deployment. New visa fees are likely to increase operating expenses by an estimated $100-$250m for India's top IT companies, which is about 1% of their revenues, according to Moody's Analytics. This only adds to the severe headwinds for this critically important sector which represents about 80% of India's total services exports.