CHENNAI/PUNE — Ankit joined TCS in 2021. His first project was a banking application for a UK client. He spent three years on it. He learned the client's systems, their processes, their preferences, their escalation contacts, and the name of the British project manager's dog, which was relevant once during a call that went well as a result. In March 2025, the project ended. The client moved to an AI-first model. Ankit moved to the bench. It is now May 2026. Ankit is still on the bench. He has been on the bench for fourteen months. He gets his salary every month. He logs in every morning and marks his attendance. He has completed seven mandatory trainings on the internal learning portal. He has written a blog on the company intranet about "my journey with cloud computing." Nobody read it. The Resource Management Group emails him every 30 days saying they are "actively looking for suitable projects." They have been actively looking for fourteen months. The looking is active. The results are not.

TCS's bench culture is being actively dismantled — the company has cut 23,460 people partly to reduce bench overhead. But in mid-tier and smaller IT companies, the bench remains a permanent feature of the landscape: a holding pattern for people whose skills don't match current project needs, whose billing has stopped but whose employment hasn't, and whose existence is known to HR, unknown to clients, and expensive to the P&L in a way that is motivating companies to either allocate or eliminate at a speed that feels, to the person on the bench, like either rescue or execution, both of which are preferable to fourteen months of optional webinars.