Pink slip and pay cut panic have begun haunting the techies at the state’s information technology (IT) hub in Salt Lake Electronic Complex.

For months, the 20-something boys and girls in tech town have been on the edge, watching the slide of the dollar and reading reports of a possible recession in the US. Recent news of job losses at two of the biggest recruiters — TCS and IBM — has compounded their fear.

“Every time I get official mail, I feel it’s my turn to get the axe,” said a TCS employee, who quit a government job last year to chase a dollar dream.

Earlier this month, TCS made an official announcement on striking off 500-plus people from its rolls. Though IBM has not issued such a statement, insiders in the company confirm that at least 200 have been shown the door.

“A test was conducted among new recruits and around 200 were sacked,” said a Jadavpur University graduate working with IBM for two years.

IBM officials were not available for comment, but a TCS spokesperson said there was nothing unusual about the job loss. “It is nothing unusual for us to fire under-performers and we do it every year. We are not undertaking retrenching,” said Pradipto Bagchi, the national head of corporate communication, TCS.

Regular performance appraisal is common in the IT industry and employees failing to deliver are shown the door.

“Our firm had hired around 28,000 people last year. In that context, 500 is not much. But the number itself is large and the fear is natural when you look at it against the backdrop of a weak dollar,” said a former TCS employee.

Devaluation of the dollar against the Indian rupee means lower revenues for domestic IT companies.

The weak dollar, pink slips — around 125 and 200 in the TCS and IBM city offices, respectively — and the cut in the variable pay in TCS have become the talking points in Sector V.

With the annual assessments nearing, the other issue is increment. “It’s clear that 2008 is going to be bad in terms of a raise,” said an employee of Skytech Solutions, a software services firm. “Some of my friends in TCS have spent three months on the bench and that’s a bad sign as well,” he added.

Benched, in IT industry parlance, means people not involved in any project.

Industry insiders agree that the average bench size has increased in some companies, but they refuse to read too much into it.

“There’s nothing abnormal in what’s happening. A lot of these measures are taken to improve profitability of companies. I don’t think there is any reason to panic,” said Kalyan Kar, the managing director of Acclaris, a BPO company.