On November 22, India’s largest engineering firm, Larsen and Toubro (L&T), announced the biggest layoff in recent times in its Q2FY17 (quarter two, financial year of 2017) press conference. The company said it had given pink slips to 14,000 employees in the last six months in various sectors of its business.

Business Standard and Mint carried the quarterly results of the company on their front pages yesterday in the sidebar and as a single-column report, respectively. The news of the layoffs was only a footnote and not highlighted in the headlines of both the financial dailies. L&T’s “profit surges” and “impressive numbers” dominated both the news reports.

The Financial Express carried the report on its page 4. The stress again was on the company’s profits, while the layoffs were mentioned in a box with Chief Financial Officer Shankar Raman stating that the company was trying to “right-size the businesses”.

The Economic Times, in contrast, carried the development as single-column story on the front page. It was the only paper that deemed the layoffs headline material: L&T sheds 14,000. Details like how many people were sacked in different businesses was not disclosed, noted the report.The Times of India, Hindustan Times and Indian Express reported the company’s quarterly results as a snippet in their business and economy sections. None mentioned that the company had downsized 11 per cent of its workforce.

Today, the coverage on L&T is next to nothing. The Financial Express has an editorial piece on page 8 headlined “Wake-up call from L&T”. The edit piece explains the gravity of the development.

“The news that L&T has laid off 14,000 employees over a period of six months comes as a rude shock. Such large lay-offs are rare in Indian industry and typically take place when a plant or factory shuts down altogether.”

Of course, the layoffs and what they signal for the economy did not make it to any of the prime-time discussions on TV yesterday.

Newslaundry spoke to Hindol Sengupta, a business journalist with Fortune India, about why this might have been deemed not news-worthy. He felt the scarce coverage was indicative of a maturing Indian media. “Larsen and Toubro is going through one of the biggest transitions in the corporate world. The company, which was headed by A M Naik for years is going to become a new L&T under a new leadership,” he said, explaining that the layoffs were “not a big deal”. The media, he said, had a tendency of jumping to conclusions before all the facts were known, “Many a times, the media tends to jump to conclusions and show the company in a bad light. It is a deep socialist entrenchment of the media. I’m not saying the media shouldn’t criticise a company, but before doing that, it should certainly understand how the company has gone through a historic transition.”

Notably, most of reports focused on company-speak and the management’s side of the story – copies were peppered with words like “rightsizing” and “strategic decision”. It is not clear which business saw the maximum retrenchment and the challenges ahead; neither did the papers carry testimonies of any of the workers who were laid-off.

The issue, then, is not whether a company is shown in bad light per se but the fact that the story was grossly underreported. There’s even conflicting reports on whether 14,000 employees were laid off over three or six months. Irrespective of the timeframe, though, one would imagine 11 per cent of the workforce being laid off in India’s largest engineering major would be headline material. Not quite.