"Assocham withdraws its report of 25 per cent job cuts," chamber Secretary General D S Rawat said in a statement hours after Finance Minister P Chidambaram criticised it for setting off a panic with its report -- whose sample size the industry chamber is yet to make public.

Rawat simply said the report was "not representative of the industrial segment in its totality."

He said the "analysis" of job cuts was primarily in real estate, brokerage and investment advisory sectors. "The chamber's research team is now following up its recent analysis with a detailed survey on a much larger sample size to get a more definitive picture on corporate response to the present crisis," Rawat said.

Interestingly, he said new job opportunities were emerging in education, bio-technology, petroleum and chemicals and health. The government and rival business chambers had slammed Assocham for the report that spread a scare among employees.

While FICCI has already contradicted the Assocham findings, CII is in the process of countering the job loss claims with its own study.

"We do not believe any immediate threat exists of the form that Assocham is alluding to. We should not panic," FICCI president Rajeev Chandrasekhar had said.