With grim resignation, D.P. Yadav, a driver at Mindspace, an outsourcing hub in Mumbai's suburbs, spits out his paan, the Indian betel leaf equivalent of chewing tobacco. He has seen passengers and fares disappear as the global economic slowdown has made its impact felt on a place that only a few months ago bustled like a university campus.
"I have not got my salary for the last one month," says Mr Yadav, one of hundreds who ferry the information technology park's thousands of young workers between their homes and the office. "Our bosses say that their bills have not been paid by the call centre players. Hence they are unable to pay us."
Even before last week's terrorist attacks on India's financial centre, the country's outsourcing industry was starting to experience something unprecedented: a slowdown.
The sector, which handles everything from the computer systems of its overseas clients to their mortgage processing businesses and customer contact centres, has risen in the past 10 years to become one of the country's main economic drivers. Last year it brought in more than $40bn (£27bn, €32bn), while its relatively highly paid, big-spending workforce whose average age is in the mid-20s has become a mainstay of India's new consumer economy.
"This is one of the most serious [slowdowns] I've seen personally because it's affecting the whole world," says S. Ramadorai, chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT outsourcing company.
TCS and its peers say the restructuring or collapse of some of their biggest clients in the west is leading to fewer fresh outsourcing contracts. While some may still achieve growth in revenue this year of up to 20 per cent, most expect next year to be worse. Gone are the annual growth rates of the past decade of about 30 per cent or more.
No one will predict what might happen next year, given the uncertainty affecting their overseas clients. The ultimate effect of the terror attacks is also unknown. But the companies fear that growing western protectionism as more people lose jobs could further hurt them.
The larger groups, including TCS, Infosys Technologies and Firstsource, say they are honouring their existing recruitment commitments but are allowing natural attrition to prune headcounts. More severely affected, they say, are smaller operators that are dependent on only a few clients or are owned by overseas institutions.
"Clearly, in a market where the big guys are finding growth hard to come by, the smaller guys will find it very difficult to get growth," says Ananda Mukerji of Firstsource. Staff at Goldman Sachs' centre in Bangalore, which employs young analysts, say meanwhile they have been told they will be affected by the bank's worldwide plans to shed at least 10 per cent of its employees. "Until now, I had thought that we would sail through these turbulent times," says one young Goldman employee.
In October, a unit of the US-based Gridstone that crunches numbers on listed companies for its analysts in the US asked half its 175 workers in Mumbai to leave after clients such as Lehman Brothers went bust. "Just a month earlier, I bought a motorbike, borrowing at an 18 per cent interest rate. I don't know what to do," says one employee, who was given a month's salary for redundancy.
At the Sports Bar in a new mall near Mindspace, a venue that normally caters to crowds of outsourcing workers, only one of the many tables is occupied. "We opened this place in July and business is already down by half," says Ashwini Kumar, the assistant manager. "If things continue like this, we might not continue beyond a few months."