The story so far: Wipro recently changed how long some of its employees can remain without a billable project. Under its revised bench policy, effective October 1, employees in Band 2 and below can reportedly remain unallocated for up to 180 calendar days. For Band 3 and above, the standard period is 45 days, while employees with disabilities have a 75-day period. Employees in Band 2 and below who remain unallocated for 180 days can be separated under their employment contracts. Wipro did not respond to queries from The Hindu.

The change comes as recent industry estimates point to shorter bench periods and lower bench strength. Average bench time at large IT-services companies was estimated at 35–45 days in 2025, compared with 45–60 days in FY20 and FY21. The proportion of employees on the bench was estimated at 2–5%, down from 10–15% earlier.

So what exactly is the bench, and why has it been such an important part of the Indian IT business model?

What is the bench?

In IT services, the bench is broadly the pool of employees on a company’s payroll who are not currently assigned to a billable client project. They may be waiting for another assignment, undergoing training or working on internal initiatives. The exact definition can vary between companies.

The bench exists because companies have to balance workforce capacity against uneven project demand. A company that wins a large project needs people ready to work on it, but hiring, training and demand do not always happen at the same time. Carrying some spare capacity allows faster deployment when demand materialises, but a company continues to incur employee costs while those employees are not generating billable revenue.

That is why utilisation matters. A higher proportion of employees who are not deployed on billable work can weigh on utilisation and margins. But being on the bench does not necessarily mean being unproductive. It could mean employees may be training, working on internal projects or developing skills for another deployment.

When did the bench become part of Indian IT?

There is little evidence of a single point at which the Indian IT industry introduced a formal bench model. Company records show that unallocated capacity was already being measured and discussed by the early 2000s.

In April 2001, Infosys told analysts that the company had “slightly more than 1,000 people on the bench” at the end of the quarter. Utilisation excluding training was 73%; the remaining unbilled effort included employees on the bench as well as those on leave, management, research and development and internal information-systems projects.

Such disclosures show that unallocated capacity was already an identifiable part of workforce management at a major Indian IT-services company by the early 2000s.

Why did companies carry a bench?

A large bench was not always regarded as waste. When companies expected demand to rise, retaining trained employees allowed them to respond to new projects without having to recruit and train an entirely new workforce.

Wipro’s FY2011-12 annual report points to its investment in a “strategic bench to fuel growth”, which contributed to gross utilisation falling from 69.9% in FY11 to 68.3% in FY12.

The bench could therefore be both an investment and a cost, where companies could deliberately carry employees ahead of expected demand, accepting lower utilisation in anticipation of future projects.

Why did just-in-time hiring emerge?

The economics of carrying a bench changed when demand weakened. Spare capacity that could be deployed quickly during a growth phase became a cost when projects were delayed or failed to materialise.

Wipro’s October 2009 earnings call illustrates the shift. Then CEO Suresh Vaswani said the company’s bench had fallen from around 11,000 employees to about 7,000 and that Wipro had made its “people supply chain” tighter and more “just-in-time” in hiring and recruitment.

HCL Technologies took a similar approach during the 2008-09 downturn. Then CEO Vineet Nayar said the company had adopted “just in time hiring”, arguing that people could be hired at seven days’ notice and that there was therefore “no point of increasing your bench.”

The history is therefore not a simple journey from large benches to small ones. Companies have moved between carrying spare capacity and tightly controlling it depending on demand and utilisation.

How did companies make the bench productive?

Some companies tried to change what happened to employees between projects rather than simply reduce their numbers.

Persistent Systems said in its FY2016-17 annual report that the need to leverage employees when they were not working on customer projects had led to the “dissolution of the Bench” and the creation of TeXT, or Transforming Employee Experiences. Employees between projects could work on timed projects involving AI, machine learning, natural language processing, IoT and analytics.

Infosys launched its Zero Bench programme in 2015, creating an internal marketplace for employees awaiting longer-term assignments. In its FY2015-16 annual report, Infosys said the programme was intended to “eradicate the bench”. Within nine months, more than 12,000 jobs had been created on the marketplace, and more than 67% of employees who were on the bench had completed at least one assignment.

Eliminating the bench as an idle period is not necessarily the same as eliminating employees being between client projects. The interval can instead be filled with internal work, training or other assignments.

What is AI changing?

AI is changing what makes an employee deployable. IT-services companies are increasingly linking workforce planning to skills and reskilling. TCS’s FY2025-26 annual report says its talent model is centred on skills, roles and talent, and reports more than 2.7 lakh employees with advanced AI and machine-learning proficiency.

Wipro’s FY2025-26 filing describes a “Skill as a Currency” approach involving upskilling, reskilling and cross-skilling, while Infosys’s FY2025-26 ESG report says its AI strategy includes enabling employees to be deployed to relevant projects through upskilling.

The bench is therefore increasingly a skills-matching problem as well as a headcount problem. An employee can be available but not immediately deployable if their skills do not match the projects entering the pipeline.

Therefore, AI is not simply shrinking the bench. It is changing the definition of who is deployable. 

Who bears the risk?

A bench is a buffer against uncertain demand, but it involves a trade-off for companies. Maintaining one means carrying the cost of employees without billable assignments, while maintaining too little means risking a shortage of trained talent when demand picks up.

For employees, a shorter bench window leaves less time to find another assignment, and prolonged non-deployment can eventually put the employee’s job at risk. Skills mismatch can add to that risk, as an employee may be available but not suitable for the projects in the pipeline.

Therefore, the bench becomes a balancing act for both sides, with companies managing capacity and employees managing deployment risk.

Published – October 03, 2026 03:17 am IST