BANGALORE: There is a buzz that AOL India is about to lay off people. Some say the scale of layoffs would be substantial. AOL's $315-million acquisition of online media company The Huffington Post last month has created a situation where sections of its 1,000-strong employee base in India are seen to have become redundant.An AOL India spokesperson said a restructuring based on the Huffington Post merger was in the works. "Various business units will see changes," the spokesperson said. A team from the US is expected in India within the next few days to announce changes.AOL India has a mix of technology and content creation teams. The Huffington Post comes with similar talent, though it's only about 200 people. But The Huffington Post model appears to have emerged as the preferred one for the merged entity. AOL has handed over to Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post's founder, complete control of AOL's editorial content.She will oversee AOL's national, local and financial news operations, as also other media properties like MapQuest and Moviefone.Post the acquisition last month, The New York Times reported, quoting sources, that AOL's own news Web sites like Politics Daily and Daily Finance are "likely to disappear when the deal is completed". It added that many of the writers who work for those sites would become Huffington Post writers. Whether such a transfer would apply to any of the content creators in AOL India is not clear yet.In India, teams put together articles, photo collections, do quality analysis. "During the Oscars, we would watch the ceremony and blog real-time from here about it," an employee said.The Huffington Post, which began in 2005, is today one of the most heavily visited news websites in the US, thanks partly to reader engagement tools it has created. For the $3-billion, 6,000-people strong AOL, which is trying to position itself as a strong content player, these millions of readers can translate to advertising revenues.Much of The Huffington Post's content is aggregated from other news sources, though it is said to have begun to invest more in original reporting and writing. Its strategy has been to take out the central points in a competitor's story, throw in a headline that is certain to bring it among the top links in a search, and post it. Though it credits the original site, many have slammed the strategy as being opportunistic. But it has worked for the company; it turned profitable last year.