Layoff are not harmful to people's career - lack of regular training, roles changes and lack of opportunity to work work in new technologies is more harmful.
After a person work for firm for 10 years (with consistent performance ) and then the Indian IT industry finds that they are unable to utilize the senior folks who worked as per the business needs (read legacy technologies and taking frequent rotation, that prevent person from acquiring core expertise). It shows the IT services as a career track is not a viable option any more .
people are forced to work on legacy and rotated to frequently . laid off people are insulted and labelled as incompetent with out evaluation.
While hiring fromout side all indian IT services firms want people to have long term exposure to a specific technology in a specific domain,(a mis of tech and mix of domain is a no no ) once hired the person is made to work in areas irrelevant to his core expertise (and forced to groom trainees in his core area) in the name of flexibility and business needs.